Send "The Hold Steady " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Ew |
 From the opening Dobro to the closing nature sounds, the Hold Steady's fifth album Heaven is Whenever is full of mature serenity. Don't freak out — America's greatest bar band still rocks. But Craig Finn is singing now, not just spitting literate slam poetry, and Tad Kubler's massive arena riffs command attention instead of giggling at their own audacity. If 2008's Stay Positive was a haunted wastoid cautionary tale, Heaven is a survivor's celebration of staying alive. A–...full text |
| Prefixmag |
| Heaven Is Whenever is the Hold Steady's fifth album overall and first without mustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay since Separation Sunday. Lead man Craig Finn has called this album "less anthemic and more complex" than their previous four albums. Judging from the first four songs released from the record, he's right about the complexity but missed the mark about the anthems. Lyrical content here is par for the course for the Hold Steady -- hyper-wordy and smart narratives of drugs, drinking,...full text |
| Musicomh |
| New music isn't created in a vacuum - it's patched together from listening experiences. In many ways, the process of making new music resembles a conversation. Musicians listen to what has already been said and then recast it, add to it, or simply parrot it. If every new album that comes out is part of a discussion, then The Hold Steady's Craig Finn and Tad Kubler are sitting at a dive bar on a Saturday night having a round with Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Page and short story writer Raymond Carver. After four albums, The Hold Steady are still culling the best from American classic rock and delivering it alongside portraits of modern living as seen from a barfly's perspective. Finn's half-slurred rambles about lost loves, drugged-up misadventures, and youth being wasted on the young can be heard on any given night in any bar in any part of the world. The thing that sets the band apart, though, is its unfaltering optimism: Finn may be pouring his heart out, but everyone in the bar is rapt, listening to his stories and joining in for the uplifting, anthemic refrains. Heaven Is Whenever doesn't really change The Hold Steady's successful formula. The recent departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay simply means a return to the band's earlier sound of prominently featured guitars and songs full of straightforward heavy riffs. Keys still appear on the album - leading the charge on the Springsteen-inspired Our Whole Lives, reverberated to hell on A Slight Discomfort - but they take a lesser role here than they did in the wall of sound efforts on Boys And Girls In America....full text |
The Hold Steady lyrics
