Band: The Hold Steady
Album: Stay Positive
Label: Vagrant
Overall Score: 3.5/5

The Hold Steady hands the listener quite a few contradictions with Stay Positive. Fitted with a decidedly optimistic title, it’d be easy to expect an album of up-tempo numbers about ice cream on sunny days and romance without any complication. Instead, Craig Finn provides us with some pretty bleak narratives – whether they be about stabbings, religious hallucinations, etc – that make the positivity insisted on by the album’s title seem almost out of reach. Almost, but not quite.

What keeps Stay Positive from being a complete good-mood-killer is the ease with which The Hold Steady can handle such dark topics, often surrounding them with deceptively uppity sounding instrumentals. Take, for example, “Sequestered in Memphis”, which seems to tell of a police interrogation, yet comes off as a track that is actually pretty fun due to gritty, swirling guitars and a bursting beat. That’s not to say that The Hold Steady keep things reasonably bouncy for the majority of Stay Positive – the album also contains songs like “Lord, I’m Discouraged”, with a soft piano and downtrodden vocals that pull together for an effect that tugs at the heart just the tiniest bit.

The main thing that may turn listeners away from The Hold Steady is Finn’s vocals. Most of the time, he’s laying raspy half-spoken lines over the music, which occasional leads to the illusion that he’s more of a beat poet than the front man of a reasonably successful indie band. But really, if there’s one thing that people like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac taught us, it’s that beat poets and the like can be really, really cool, not to mention great storytellers, the latter being a quality that is put to use often on Stay Positive.

“Navy Sheets” is the one song on Stay Positive that just doesn’t seem to fit, with a slightly out-of-pitch bit of electronica serving as the backbone to the track in an awkward fashion that tends to drag the track down. Any bit of a grudge that the listener might be holding onto from that track is completely forgotten about by the time that The Hold Steady head into their expansive closing track, “Slapped Actress”, which takes just as much strength from heavy, churning guitars as it does a dainty piano while Finn seems to tie up any of the loose ends that may have been left behind lyrically earlier on Stay Positive.

With Stay Positive, The Hold Steady gives us several ways to enjoy the album. At face value, it’s musically tight and clean, with unusual vocals and occasionally complex arrangements. Looking beneath the surface, the listener is fed some pretty interesting stories. While the outlook on Stay Positive might at times seem a bit gloomy, The Hold Steady handle this subject matter in a way that is oddly uplifting, showing glimmers of hope in places they otherwise might not be found. And that’s exactly what makes Stay Positive so good – rather than focusing entirely on being the bearers of bad news, or being overwhelmingly cheerful, The Hold Steady give us a little bit of both, making the album not just relatable, even in it’s grandest of stories, but most importantly, it's human.