The Hold Steady: Stay Positive

The Hold Steady kicked off its 2004 debut with the

sarcastic "Positive Jam," a bitterly funny rant recounting a century's worth of

disasters and disappointments in just over three minutes. Four years later,

singer Craig Finn

has cleared the bile out of his throat and turned into a regular Norman Vincent

Peale on Stay Positive, a record informed as much by the glowing response to 2006's Boys

And Girls In America as

Finn's usual Coors 'n' Catholicism fixations. Like the run of victory-lap tours

The Hold Steady has done the past few years, Stay Positive is the work of a band that

won't take its current beloved status for granted. Finn even takes a moment

during Stay Positive's title track to give a grateful shout-out to his fans. "We

couldn't have even done this if it wasn't for you," he sings, stopping just

short of the inevitable "I love you, man!" capper.

The thing about victory laps is that they end

where they began; similarly, Stay Positive is the first Hold Steady record to sound

almost exactly like its predecessor. Stylistic departures like the harpsichord

tinkling on "One For The Cutters" and the spooky, Zeppelin-esque balladry of "Both

Crosses" aside, Stay Positive sticks with the slick, surgingly anthemic formula

of Boys And Girls In America. And that formula—consisting of E Street

piano flourishes, hair-metal guitar solos, and other assorted arena-rock clichés

that The Hold Steady revives with straight-faced sincerity—arguably works

better than ever on the dynamic one-two punch of "Constructive Summer" and "Sequestered

In Memphis," which rank with the band's best rockers. Elsewhere, Finn drops old

catchphrases in his lyrics like a funny Mike Myers, but for the first time, his

words take a back seat to The Hold Steady's most accessible music yet. A record

made for blasting and getting blasted, Stay Positive makes it easy to follow

through on its title.