I have thought long and hard about what I'm about to admit, and here it goes: right now, at this particular moment in musical time, the Hold Steady are the best band in America.

Making this claim is a difficult sacrifice for me. Not because it's not true, because, well, I wouldn't throw it out there if I didn't believe it was; no, it's difficult because it forces me to admit that I was wrong, which every occasionally happens and dicks around my self-important streak of being overwhelmingly correct with great taste in music to boot. When the Hold Steady dropped Separation Sunday in 2005, the immediate Springsteen comparisons that greeted it-- not to mention the accusations of profundity and quality-- propelled the album to the tippy-top of my must-hear list. As it turns out, the band churned out some excellent, if workaday, bar-rock chugalongs, but vocalist/lyricist Craig Finn's vocals mustered all the charm of a braying donkey, as Finn's voice is more an acquired taste than Dylan, Macy Gray, _and_ Dave Matthews, combined.

Which, of course, shoved a perfectly good set of eloquent vignettes about religious hypocrisy in suburban youth directly under the radar, and I promptly realized that, much like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and late-period Radiohead, despite all the acclaim, I just didn't _get_ the Hold Steady. When the Killers traded in their fey glitzy Vegas shtick for dustbowl, open-highway, vaguely Springsteen-ian bluster-- in 2006, a year in which, more than ever, homages to the Boss became en vogue or at least much more transparent-- I was quick to tout their accessible (albeit maligned) Sam's Town as the best album likely to garner overwhelming comparisons to Broooce of the year, despite the fact that I hadn't heard the new Hold Steady record. (In fact, I think a line that I eventually deleted from my review of the Killers record alluded to the underwhelming nature of the Hold Steady.)

But still. There's only a certain amount of praise you can ignore, and when the Hold Steady's 2006 record Boys and Girls in America began to steadily impress itself on my musical radar, I couldn't ignore it. "Seriously, Drew," a friend told me, "the way you love Springsteen, this album should be a no-brainer to you. There is _no reason_ why you shouldn't own it. You own Ryan Adams albums and that's an affront to the Hold Steady." Matt from Epinions implied (and i'm paraphrasing, dude) that praising the Killers while dissing the Hold Steady might be an act of minor sacrilege punishable by forty lashes. Brian from Epinions even echoed my own reservations, saying that he wasn't on Separation Sunday's nuts either, but Boys and Girls in America is better, and Craig Finn actually tries to sing.

So I broke down, and on a trip to do some work in Waltham, hopped on 95 with the Hold Steady in the stereo. This may be one of the best ideas i've ever had.

**

As it turns out, if you're going to be barrelling down open highway, the Hold Steady is an excellent companion. Boys and Girls in America opens with "Stuck Between Stations", and I immediately-- and I mean immediately-- changed my mind about the Hold Steady.

I don't mean that in the sense that I listened to the whole song and thought "huh, that's actually not bad." I mean that there's this succession of muted guitar chords that opens the song and sounds, incredibly, like every summer I've ever spent in New Jersey listening to Bruce Springsteen records, powering down open back roads with the windows down. I mean that after four bars of that, there's a piano line (Springsteen sideman Roy Bittan comes instantly to mind) and a four-on-the-floor drum beat, and I fell in love. I mean that by the end of that song, the Hold Steady were my new favorite band. "Stuck Between Stations" is the kind of rock anthem that we need more of, all power chords and beautiful, almost breathtaking bombast, intese lyrical references to a girl ("a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend") and sex ("he likes the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration") and youth ("most nights are crystal clear, but tonight it's like we're stuck between stations on the radio"). Good Christ, I could love this album based on this one song.

Fortunately, I don't have to. The Hold Steady may have ground along pretty appealingly on Separation Sunday, but this is a different beast entirely. Each song on Boys and Girls seems to one-up the one that came before it, effortlessly. The Hold Steady are masters of their craft: they have a knack for catchy riffs and simplistic chord progressions that, improbably, work, and they do so with energy and aplomb. Where Separation Sunday was an indie-rock album, Boys and Girls in America is a rock album, immersing itself in suburban youth party culture; it is an album that knows about Generation Y and about the children, both literal adolescents and adults stuck in holding patterns of perpetual youthful arrogance, that are a part of it; Finn tells stories from the point-of-view of kids that party in garages with beer in plastic cups, carelessly screw each other and try out new drugs, the kids that live on the towns that border big cities, that go into the urban jungle on the weekends to have new adventures, the kids that live one night to the next. In that respect, it doesn't matter that the Hold Steady are from Minneapolis; these kids could exist right outside of New York City, right outside of Boston, or from the suburbs of Philadelphia from where this review is coming.

"Chips Ahoy!" tells the story of a girl who gets high and accurately predicts the horse races; one thing that's exceptionally cool about Boys and Girls is the way the rest of the Hold Steady harmonizes with the charmingly off-key Finn, and when Finn bleats "how am I supposed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you?" the rest of the band has assembled for an impressive chorale of "whoah-oh-oh-oh"s, and everyone knows that "whoah-oh-oh"s and "sha-la-la"s are the true language of the human soul. They repeat this trick in "Massive Nights", which is twice as energetic and incredibly accurate at describing this generation's sense of invincibility; "we had some massive nights!" bellows Finn, and yet again, the rest of the band chimes in, "WHOAH-oh-oh-oh!" And much like Springsteen, who I've lauded before for spring-loading his songs with individual moments that are just deeply and indescribably cool - the a cappella breakdown in "Rosalita", the breathtaking Cinescope imagery of the first few moments of "Thunder Road" - there's a part where Finn describes a night of dancing with "there weren't any fights - there's usually one or two" and then two other Hold Steadiers harmonize "usually one or two" over the ensuing mini-drumbreak. Something about that is just awesome.

"Hot Soft Light" hits with the same force; the guitars stop, start, grind, and stop again, and Craig Finn rails on about drugs. Which doesn't make it an unusual Hold Steady song - just a typically good one. It, like "Massive Nights" and the similarly-themed "Party Pit", rocks, barrelling along with runaway-train energy, harnessing the spirit of mid-period Replacements - prime-era, too. On some of these songs, the Hold Steady are on some serious Pleased To Meet Me-type shit.

What may surprise some about Boys and Girls in America is how, when the band turns its lens toward balladry, affecting they can actually be. The epic "First Night", which functions as the album's centerpiece, is built around an evocative, tender piano part; here, Finn revisits a trio of characters from Separation Sunday, and his voice crawls to a whisper as he sings "Holly's inconsolable, unhinged and uncontrollable, 'cause we can't get as high as we got on that first night". The song builds into what will inevitably be filed alongside "Born to Run" and "Hey Jude" as one of the best outros in pop music - "boys and girls in America," Finn and company intone with increasing intensity, before admitting that "when they kiss they spit white noise." And in "Citrus," a pretty almost-ballad, Finn admits over a folksy chord progression that he's "had kisses that made Judas seem sincere," and if you can't relate to that, you've grown up far too fast.

I say all this without even mentioning "Chillout Tent", which has so many dynamics that it needs to be heard to be appreciated. I could talk for days about why I think this is the best unsung pop song of its year, but it'd be boring and reductive, and I'd rather you hear it for yourself anyway.

The Hold Steady are the best band in America right now. Craig Finn and company have taken their considerable indie cred not as an indication that they can finally be as obtuse and pretentious as they've always wanted to be, but as a way to bridge the two worlds of rock by creating rock music that real people want to listen to. The Killers can approximate that in their own robotic, synthesized way, and they make big choruses so they're automatically pleasant in my eyes; but the Hold Steady are, I can now admit, a different beast entirely. Boys and Girls in America accurately examines a host of characters, attempts to encapsulate the feelings of a generation, the spirit of a whole subsection of flawed youth. Literate and bombastic all at once, Boys and Girls in America is one of the best albums to come down the pike in a while, and God bless the Hold Steady for that. If you've been ignoring this band, take it from a reformed sinner: you need to stop, immediately.




Recommended: Yes