{"id":133,"date":"2023-04-02T13:55:39","date_gmt":"2023-04-02T17:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/?p=133"},"modified":"2023-04-02T13:55:39","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T17:55:39","slug":"the-price-of-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/the-price-of-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"The Price of Progress<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

The Hold Steady<\/h2>\n<\/div>
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

By Stephen M. Deusner<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GENRE: Rock
LABEL: Positive Jams \/ Thirty Tigers
REVIEWED: April 1, 2023
The Brooklyn band\u2019s ninth album is vivid and weird: a celebration of second winds, unlikely comebacks, and undying rock\u2019n\u2019roll dreams.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

You can almost picture Skippers, the stripmall bar that serves as the setting for \u201cCarlos Is Crying,\u201d off the Hold Steady<\/a>\u2019s ninth album. The place is packed with cubicle drones sharing pitchers of beer and guzzling glasses of box wine, everybody letting off steam on a weeknight. That\u2019s where poor Carlos finally breaks down sobbing. As Craig Finn<\/a> relates the story, the guy hasn\u2019t been to his job in weeks, even though he tells his wife he\u2019s earning a steady paycheck. This is not how he expected his life to turn out: \u201cWe started as skaters,\u201d he reminds his friends at the table. \u201cMan, we used to glide\/We used to hang like the smoke.\u201d The Hold Steady chime in with some sympathetic harmonica and a bouncing-ball guitar lick, until Carlos admits, \u201cNow every conversation I have is about money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is how the Hold Steady\u2019s characters age. They used to skate, party, take drugs, give themselves tattoos with ballpoint pens, make up clever nicknames, finger their rosaries, and chase salvation \u201cinto dark parts of big Midwestern cities.\u201d Now they work unspectacular jobs, scrape to pay mortgages, and tell the same old stories about the past as Finn measures the crushing distance between adolescent dreams and adult realities. But this is not the way the Hold Steady ages. In their best songs the scene was always better a month or a year ago, the bands always heavier, the drugs harder. They traffic in the tragicomedy of lowered expectations, and they\u2019ve yet to lapse into self-parody because Finn is always generous with the details and the Hold Steady are always ready with a dramatic guitar lick. They never condescend to any of the dreamers still clutching at their old dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than ignore the flatline trajectory of adulthood, Finn first embraced it on his solo albums, and he has examined it more determinedly with the Hold Steady over the past few years. More than anything else\u2014including their 2016 reunion with keyboardist Franz Nicolay<\/a>\u2014this untapped thematic territory gave the band a boost after two<\/a> disappointing<\/a> records. The Price of Progress<\/em> is full of second winds and unlikely comebacks, with Finn\u2019s characters finally reaching a point where they can move forward again. On opener \u201cGrand Junction,\u201d a frayed couple drift through the West, searching for a destination and almost getting there by the final verse. The song evokes a very particular American vista, with the guitars counting the white lines down the highway and the synths hitting a crack in the windshield. It\u2019s less a travelogue than a 21st-century landscape painting where \u201call the mountains were mocking our own little pitiful lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hold Steady By Stephen M. Deusner GENRE: RockLABEL: Positive Jams \/ Thirty TigersREVIEWED: April 1, 2023The Brooklyn band\u2019s ninth album is vivid and weird: a celebration of second winds, unlikely comebacks, and undying rock\u2019n\u2019roll dreams. You can almost picture Skippers, the stripmall bar that serves as the setting for \u201cCarlos Is Crying,\u201d off the Hold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabriafreeman.com\/nmc\/webdev\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}