I didn't merely call Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady the best album of 2006, as many other respected names did. No, I went one step further and declared it the best rock album I've heard since Wilco put out Being There in 1997. The Hold Steady's mixture of killer barroom rock and depictions of kids partying found the rarely heard common ground between Bruce Springsteen's The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle and The Replacements' Let It Be.
Hot on the heels of the success of Boys And Girls In America, Vagrant Records has released Live At Fingerprints, an acoustic five-song EP recorded during an in-store performance at Fingerprints, an independent record store in Long Beach, California.
Boys And Girls In America worked better than their previous records because The Hold Steady tightened up their songwriting. Lead singer Craig Finn was still shouting over guitarist's Tad Kubler's power chords, but the music was more structured, which allowed Finn to explore his melodic side.
As a result, the opening cut, "The Cattle And The Creeping Things," originally released on 2005's Separation Sunday, doesn't work as well without the anarchy behind it, but the three songs from Boys And Girls In America, including the single "Chips Ahoy," hold up when stripped down to its barest elements. Franz Nicolay's accordion, which replaces Kubler's crunch throughout the EP, brings out the pathos in "You Can Make Him Like You," and adds poignancy to the already-acoustic "Citrus," which boils Springsteen's "Spirit In The Night" down to the line, "I've seen Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers."
Live At Fingerprints is available exclusively at independent shops. For a list of all stores that will carry the CD, go to Think Indie. But act quickly, because production is limited to 5,000 copies worldwide.
Article comments
1 - jim
Actually the release was not put out by Vagrant but by the band through Junket Boy -- a lable that puts out exclusive material directly into indie record stores. It's run by The Coalition of Independent Music Stores.