It's hard to shake the sense that Craig Finn has been through hell and back. And who wouldn't think so? The wigged out, bleary voiced frontman of preeminent bar band The Hold Steady, Finn's pieces are less songs than chronicles: lowlifes and down-and-outs ambling in a druggy haze, often in the shadow of some looming Catholic myth or profound literature, while the guitars roar and rise like waves against a levee.
The Hold Steady is nothing if not energetic, but energy, sadly, is a finite resource for musicians. They either burn out or short circuit. So it makes sense that Craig Finn's first solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes features some of the least boisterous music he's ever penned. No epic riffs or piano cascades here.
True to form, religious references are abundant throughout Clear Heart Full Eyes. The narrator spies the 12 Apostles during "Apollo Bay" and Christ crops up all over the album, most prominently on "New Friend Jesus." Over a country-lite shuffle, Finn spins a friendly yarn about meeting Jesus in a parking lot, getting in his car, and starting a band, with a line that reads as a playful jab/allusion to The Hold Steady: "It's hard to suck with Jesus in your band."
In fact, compared to previous Hold Steady albums, as well as works by Finn's previous band Lifter Puller, Clear Heart Full Eyes may be the most religious centered album he has ever released. True, 2005's Separation Sunday was rife with Christ, crosses, biblical verses, and crucifixions, but the album's mawkish, drug-addled Catholicism was meant for conceptual texture, not conversion.
Suffice to say, Craig Finn is not trying to convert people with this album. Finn's religion has always been for the sake of his songs: it was almost incidental to the way his characters were screwing up their lives and spiraling out. But here the religion is a lot more homey, organic and day lit. On "Honolulu Blues,"—the closest Finn comes to penning a Hold Steady song on this album-he references noted Catholic author Graham Greene and acknowledges the comforts of growing up on hymns when you're young (and how "they made perfect sense for you."
There is still plenty of murk on Clear Heart Full Eye—shady dealings in "Western Pier" where people are selling something or other, a luckless dude living in a "Rented Room"-but nobody ever sinks as low as Holly, Charlemagne, Gideon, or any other Hold Steady song alum. Some of Clear Heart Full Eyes' characters come close though. On "Terrified Eyes," the narrator pleads with his partner returning from the hospital (with bills in tow) that they can't live like they used to, going to the bar all the time (or, the narrator concedes, "We can't go every night"). Likewise, on "No Future," Finn reels out in quick succession, "I only died on the inside" and "I'm still alive on the outside."
It is impossible to miss the note of resignation behind each of these songs. Sure, The Hold Steady play plenty of songs about invariably screwed up people, some of them irreversibly damaged, but they are still a hell of a lot of fun to listen to, even if they plumb the lives of the lowest of the low. Here the tone is weary, even a little cynical. "When No One's Watching," for instance, deals with a guy, "Feasting on the weakness of the women who were thinking / [he] might be held to half the things [he] told them." It's depressing. While Clear Heart Full Eyes doesn't rock quite like a Hold Steady record, much of Craig Finn's craft is on display, even if the songs are a little leaden.
Grade: B
