Separation Sunday

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• Date Released: May 3, 2005
• Genre: Alternative/Punk
• Style: Indie Rock
• Label: French Kiss Records / The Orchard

• We Say...

  Review by Michael Azerrad

  
  A lot of hip bands spend their time either trying to transcend their embarrassing formative years — or pretending they never happened at all. So it's refreshing that a mega-hip band like the Hold Steady so avidly explore the lie-dream of the suburban soul.
  
  Minnesotan talk-singer Craig Finn spits aphoristic poetry about wasted youth, all rehab and tawdry scenarios, in a caustic, blizzard-cutting upper Midwestern bark, his W.C. Fields often erupting into Ralph Kramden. His oracular testifying fronts beerily anthemic chord progressions, shameless twin guitar lines and fist-pumping, meat-and-potatoes riffs served up on an aluminum platter by lead guitarist Tad Kubler; theatrical dynamic shifts and the grandiose whirr of the keyboards recall Bruce Springsteen in extremis.
  
  Speaking of the Boss, songs like "Hornets! Hornets!" profile the same kind of suburban losers in albums like Born to Run, but while the Boss romanticized his characters as beautiful losers like something out of an early Scorsese flick, the people in Hold Steady songs aren't beautiful, and they're far more familiar than anything you'll ever see in a Hollywood movie. So while Springsteen rhapsodizes about a "barefoot girl sittin' on the hood of a Dodge," Finn refers to exactly the same type of person as a "hoodrat." He lards his lines with knowing Catholic references, pop culture shout-outs and repeated call-backs of a pathetic place known as "Ybor City" until they become in-jokes that even you're in on.
  
  Amid the Stonesy strut to "Charlemagne in Sweatpants" and the Zeppy swagger of "Stevie Nix," Finn rants about life on the barely-middle-class fringes of Minneapolis, but his tales of misadventure could happen anywhere from southern California to northern Massachusetts. Gimlet-eyed, Finn takes it all in with a hipster's sangfroid, a journalist's knack for detail and a playwright's ear for dialogue.
  
  But all the poetry in the world won't rock your world. The Hold Steady bring the noise, churning out guitar crunch via suburban mainstays from Bachman-Turner Overdrive to Aerosmith, those iconic '70s bands signifying not a particular time but simply the apotheosis of the form. For the Hold Steady, the riff-a-rama of the indigenous music of the American wasteland emerges as not just an aggressive catharsis, but a surprisingly reliable, if fleeting, way of jolting oneself out of the relentless catatonia induced by cheap drugs, endless strip malls and the nagging sensation that nothing will ever get any better.

• They Say...

  Review by Tim Sendra, All Music Guide

  The Hold Steady's Almost Killed Me is their hands-down masterpiece. A swirling maelstrom of intense, hilarious, and breathtaking rock & roll, it should have been the album that knocked everything else into a cocked hat in 2004. Of course, it was mostly ignored outside the homes of a handful of indie snobs and adventurous punks, but it's there, it's amazing, and most likely the band will never be able to top it. Separation Sunday comes pretty damn close, though. It is a much darker record, revolving around drug casualties, broken lives, a hoodrat fixation, spiritual and physical dissipation, and general despair, and there aren't as many easy laughs this time out -- but instead the listener gets lots of head-shaking wonderment at Craig Finn's genius lyrics and voice. His gruff, in-your-ear vocals negotiate the twisting torrent of words like a world-class skater kid. He is insanely literate and insanely insistent: he's like the guy who calls at 2:30 a.m. in a frenzy to holler about his latest disaster of the heart, the bar-stool poet with a religious obsession, or the guy who corners you at a party and just won't shut up about how Boston are the missing link between the Beatles and Derrick May -- only you don't mind because he is strangely brilliant. He is also just about the best rock & roll frontman since Bob Pollard. In fact, the group sounds a bit like Guided By Voices at times, only a Guided By Voices that want to kick your sorry can up and down the length of the bar. Or maybe a GBV that worship Springsteen instead of the Who. Whipping up a classic rock-inspired frenzy of monitor-straddling guitar riffs, dual harmony leads, E Street piano flourishes, and galloping horns, the band behind Finn sounds like nothing less than Jim Steinman's dream group. You could talk about great individual songs (the epic "How a Resurrection Really Feels," the piledriving album opener "Hornets! Hornets!," the weird and almost funky "Charlemagne in Sweatpants"), but the strength of the album is in the flow from song to song and the way the intensity level (which starts off at a near fever pitch) elevates until your head is just about ready to burst from the thrill of it all. Call it a quaint idea in 2005, but Separation Sunday is truly an album, one that sounds almost perfect when played from beginning to end in the proper running order. Block out about 42 minutes sometime, hold steady, and get ready for indie rock -- no, rock & roll -- at its sweatiest, most intense, and most impressive. Long live the album; long live the Hold Steady.

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Related Artists Musicians connected to The Hold Steady

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The Oranges Band, Modest Mouse, Paul Westerberg, Ted Leo, Spoon

Roots and Influences:

Grifters, The Replacements, Thin Lizzy

Formal Connections:

The World/Inferno Friendship Society, End Transmission, Lifter Puller

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