The Hold Steady - These are the people in our neighborhood
..... might see a panhandler and think about him in a very specific way for years after, modifying him into a character or characters who become something like family members to thousands and thousands of the New York-by-way-of-Minneapolis band's fans. They are the Charlemagnes and all the extras that Finn puts into these songs - the big, bad guitar rockers -- that are just serials playing out over years and years, soap operas on bar floors that are combinations of all matters of good buzz and bad hangover, of right and wrong getting confused for the other until there's no distinction any longer, just some highly evolved religious harangue getting its limbs all in a knot. The Hold Steady is a decidedly Midwestern band and they'll never be able to get away from it, even by moving off to the city that never sleeps. Everywhere you look in one of his songs, Finn is bringing us closer to those half-flattened, half-deflated men who can't help but work at the grain elevator, the mill, the truck yard, or on the assembly line at the packing plant until they've run out of years, finally able to retire, which only means spending a couple of years enjoying their failing health and their futile memories of work and all of those six-packs they picked up at the convenience store on their way home at 5 o'clock. Finn is a maker of these people, or just the guy who props them up and buys them a drink.......
download at daytrotter.com
email needed, 10minutemail.com will do

