For musicians with Minnesota roots, the state seems to exercise a kind of artistic magnetism with a lingering effect that holds on long after they've moved on to national status. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited added his home stretch of road to the rock and roll canon. Prince's Purple Rain helped make Minneapolis' First Avenue club into a national landmark.
Craig Finn, who fronted Twin Cities indie kingpins Lifter Puller before moving to Brooklyn and forming the Hold Steady in 2000, takes this hometown focus to an extreme. Across three albums, Finn has built songs around a handful of recurring characters and their Twin Cities misadventures with drugs, drinking and religion, peppered with so many name and place checks that you can find a Google map laying out each reference geographically. So far, each Hold Steady album has topped the last, but on the band's latest, Boys and Girls in America, they surpass not only themselves but also just about everything else released in 2006.
Cursed with the same problem afflicting most groups with eminently charismatic frontmen or women, tracks on the band's first two albums occasionally came off first and foremost as platforms for Craig Finn's biting delivery (a worthy cause, as his lyrics have never fallen short of entertaining and incisive), but on Boys and Girls the band pulls just as much weight. Part of the change is a turn toward more complex songwriting. For better or worse, listeners won't find a track here that's content to chug along on just two power chords. Much of the difference is due to the band's decision to rope in some additional players to bulk up its usually stripped down line-up in the form of brass, strings and a B3 organ with a habit of stealing the show on some of the album's biggest moments.
Correspondingly, the production on Boys and Girls has been geared up considerably as well, and to great effect. Hold Steady records, even when stripped down, have always been made to play loud, but with the huge sound on tracks like ""Chips Ahoy"" and ""Stuck Between Stations"" it's hard to imagine doing justice to Boys and Girls without shaking some ceiling tiles loose.
Lyrically, Boys and Girls takes on much of the same subject matter as 2005's Separation Sunday, narrating the ups and downs of the hard-partying life from the perspectives of Holly, Charlemagne, Gideon and Finn's other favorite protagonists. The songs here take a turn toward the melancholy as Finn sympathizes more strongly with his characters, who are aging and burning out on all the party drugs. (The chorus hook of ""Citrus,"" ""I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere"" is the best Bright Eyes line that Conor Oberst never wrote.) While this means that none of the songs on Boys and Girls pack the same comic punch as older tracks like ""Knuckles"" or ""Banging Camp,"" the added emotional heft makes nearly every track here into a stomping anthem.
Finn is one of music's most literate songwriters, cleverly melding the hopes and anxieties of a generation of music fans into corrosively entertaining anecdotes about the boozy underbelly of growing up. When his lyrics are married to hooks as catchy as those on Boys and Girls in America the result is one of the most exciting albums in years.
