Review: The Hold Steady - Teeth Dreams
[Washington Square, 2014]
Rating: 8/10
By Brittany Oblak, Contributor
All musicians are meant to be storytellers, and every song they write a story. However, there are few musicians and bands anymore that do it quite as well as Craig Finn and company who comprise indie rock heavyweight champs The Hold Steady.
Its 2010 effort Heaven Is Whenever was less than savory to critics and fans alike. The recent loss of former keyboardist Franz Nicolay at the time left a void that was hard to fill, not to mention the band’s approximately year-long hiatus to make way for Finn’s solo effort.
But the NYC natives are certainly on the up-and-up with their new release Teeth Dreams. Consumerism, sad boys and girls in America, anxiety dreams and even some advice: this album is the classic Craig Finn mix bag of thoughts, stories and characters for which one could ever need or hope.
The opening track, “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You,” is an all-too familiar tale of bringing a new beau home to meet…well…shady friends from home. You know, those people that you’ve known forever and just can’t not be friends with, but you only hang out with them because they won’t leave you alone until you do (“there’s just these guys that I know, we go back pretty deep”).
Musically, this song picks up in classic THS fashion, perhaps where Heaven Is Wherever failed to leave off. Appropriately the first track, this song shows the band’s noted influences like Springsteen and The Replacements with The Hold Steady’s signature classic, driving rock sound.
“The Only Thing” touches on the feelings of anxiety, despair and uncertainty that come with a fresh break-up, and it also contains the album’s namesake (“Last night her teeth were in my dreams”). Teeth dreams are extremely common and usually note general anxiety or anxiety about appearance.
In this instance, Finn seems to be drawing on anxiety dreams normally about oneself that are instead about another person, specifically his estranged love.
But what would a record from The Hold Steady be without a heavy literature influence? Probably non-existent, but luckily for everyone the track “On With the Business” is about consumerism, and Finn draws on the writing of the late David Foster Wallace.
In this song, he talks about “American sadness” which is the void that we, as Americans, try to fill with material things or substances. Subsequently, these things never quite fill an emotional void and one is left with even more bad feelings than before.
“Almost Everything,” the second-to-last song on the album, is the only acoustic song and delivers a nice break to a consistently rock-steady, loud album. Even more than its comparably soft sound, the biggest phenomena on the entire album might happen in this song where Finn is almost…dare it be said…singing!
This album doesn’t leave much to be desired. Of course it’s not Boys and Girls In America, but it’s still telling their stories, perhaps as just men and women. Craig Finn is a big fan of redemption, and this album certainly redeemed The Hold Steady from their last release.
Although no one really ever doubted their ability to do so. Hey, we all get in a funk sometimes, and emerging from that funk is usually when the magic happens.
