The Hold Steady indeed

The Hold Steady, a Brooklyn-based band with the tongue-in-cheek tagline “America’s Number One Bar Band”, left the bars for a little while and stopped by Boston’s Royale Nightclub on Tuesday night.Lead singer Craig Finn brought his homespun tales of adolescent heartache and beer-bleached cynicism to a sympathetic and quintessentially Boston crowd. The audience raised a tightly clenched fist to the outro chant on “Constructive Summer”- “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer / I think he might’ve been our only decent teacher,” knocking back drinks and bodies in a collective fit of catharsis.

And herein lies the magic of Craig Finn’s lyrical storytelling: He’s got the Springsteen-esque middle-class Americana tale down pat (a la “You work at the mill until you die”) but the eloquence of an exquisite kind of dissatisfaction belonging almost exclusively to a younger generation. “He likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration,” shouted Finn on standout 2006 single “Stuck Between Stations,” a song which wove a tale of disillusionment that comes with growing up.

While this might sound depressing as hell, Finn and co. certainly know how to get a party started. Despite the melancholic subject matter of their songs, The Hold Steady really do live up to their reputation as the elusive modern-day bar band, with guitar solos and snarling
power chords that sound familiar enough to belong at your local dive alongside an order of half-price nachos, yet ferocious enough to whip a nearly-full Royale Nightclub into a moshing, crowd-surfing frenzy.

The band blazed through crowd favorites like “Hot Soft LIght,” “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” and (by far the strongest song of the night) “Chips Ahoy,” and over the course of their hour and a half set, Finn became more and more manic, echoing the stories presented in his talk-singing voice with big hand gestures and between-verse shouts of “Right?!” He presented each song to an audience like a crazed musical Woody Allen, jumping and gesticulating and searching the faces in the crowd as though he were recounting the day’s events for a new friend at, well, the bar.

Sure, the band’s harmonies were a bit off and they didn’t think to bring a piano to accompany them. Sure, Craig Finn dresses kind of like my dad, and sure, sometimes the feedback from the guitars was a little rough on the ears. But in this case, a little bit of heart goes a long way, and watching Finn cut out his own heart onstage and fling it gleefully into the audience was nothing other than a treat, at least for this disillusioned millennial.