The Hold Steady, Stay Positive

Like the stories of Raymond Carver and the films of Kevin Smith, Hold Steady songs exist inside a specific, self-contained universe. There's a big Catholic church on the corner, a crumbling parking lot where hoodrats hang out and inject questionable substances; there's a water-damaged harbor bar where the jukebox always plays Meatloaf and a series of all-ages hardcore shows where restless teenagers show up to either experiment with toxins or to angrily refuse the same. The characters all know each other, too: Hallelujah and Charlemagne have stumbled in and out of enough Hold Steady songs to warrant above-the-title billing and even some of the second-tier characters are starting to look familiar. Close quarters like these tend to drive away casual listeners, but for die-hards it creates a kind of community — one long, never-ending narrative that just gets more complicated and circuitous with each new outing.

On Stay Positive, the character arcs are still mostly the same — there are screwed-up Catholics trying to get their heads straight, on-and-off drug fiends ambivalent about their habits and lonely girls doing the wrong thing to get attention — the difference is that the sets have gotten more elaborate. No longer content to rely on shaved-down classic rock riffery (though there's still plenty of that), Craig Finn & Co. now drag out the harpsichord and the Theremin and the banjo, preferring texture over power. Finn has changed, too; he used to just bark, but now he sings — and sings well — yanking the songs across their peaks and valleys.

2006's Boys & Girls in America attempted a similar sonic expansion but fell flat due to logey production that waxed the guitars to an unearthly gleam and made the background vocals sound like they were happening in a different song. Stay Positive is tighter and darker, less concerned with the payoff than the setup. People like to compare the Hold Steady to Springsteen, but the truth is that they're doing Springsteen's career in reverse, starting with Born in the U.S.A. and moving backwards to the complexity and relative subtlety of records like The River and Darkness at the Edge of Town. Stay Positive is best at its bleakest: "Joke About Jamaica" is a slow dive downward, a grim tale of a poor used girl poured out over sub-basement riffs and villainous piano; "Both Crosses" — the album's haunting centerpiece by a mile — is another of Finn's strange Catholic visions. Acoustic guitars cluster like gathering storm clouds as Finn croaks out stark prophecy: "She saw the footage right before it got cut/ And she saw the body and she saw the blood/ She saw the angel put the sword in his side/ And baby, that's how we got canonized."

There are still plenty of carousers — "Sequestered in Memphis" is a straightforward shout-along, "Constructive Summer" is Hold Steady Anthem Rock 101 — but the best of these also branch out. "Yeah Sapphire" is a perfect example: patiently midtempo, it lazily repeats a single circular guitar pattern, blossoming slowly into a bright and gorgeous chorus. "I know the last time we touched I came on a bit rough, please forgive me," Finn pleads. This is the Hold Steady Universe circa 2008: a little more subtle, a little bit wider, a little more prone to gentleness. And, underneath it all, just as fucked-up as ever.