The Singles Jukebox

…and most people are DJs.

[Video][Website]
[4.12]

Katherine St Asaph: Let’s meet our ragtag cast of characters: a pretty little thing with an iPhone spinner where her heart would be, who goes out on Mondays to sexually frustrate men because IDK I guess that’s what they guess women do; a “big city” I’m guessing is, like, Greensboro; a heap of Big Deal Reactionary Rockness; and oh yes, the drunken, lurching dude of choice, who, judging by this recording, must be the drummer.
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Patrick St. Michel: The Hold Steady have been taking all opportunities to talk about how their new album is not another Hold Steady record. That is, after listening to “Spinners,” pure we-need-a-sub-head bluster. Nights out, confused young people, booze, guitars… yep, it is a Hold Steady song, one that sounds like a worse “You Can Make Him Like You.” So, not a new Hold Steady, just a warmed-up version.
[4]

Will Adams: After a galloping 6/8 opening, we nosedive into Craig Finn waxing contemplative into a frosted mug in some shitty bar in a big city — it’s almost as much of a buzzkill as Finn’s angsty musings themselves.
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Anthony Easton: Craig Finn used to be a bit like Raymond Carver without the editor — a little shaggier, a bit more allegorical, but working class, exhausted, and beautifully bleak. His ability to rework cliches brought aesthetic control to stories of complete loss, spinning cliches in delicate spider webs. The last few albums have given up this instinct, and they let the guitar carry words that are cruder, less sensitive, and perhaps in need of that legendary editor. Maybe it’s spending all that time with Klosterman, but this single continues that pattern. 
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Brad Shoup: Once, I would have thrilled to Finn flexing a facility with melody. I would have linked to John Darnielle’s unpacking of “Mission Viejo”. You could have knocked me over with talk about Midwest bar bands and early Springsteen, even if I had never accorded either much weight. The fact that one of the Rock Genius annotators for this song is named iCraig would’ve tickled me to point of sharing during IRL conversation. (Cat and I bought one, on a whim, for a party. When we’re not having parties it charges my phone while we watch Hulu Plus.) Hell, I would’ve taken the absence of his repertory players and his phonic reversals as some sort of growth step, something to get them to the next level, or just to keep him from forever being the smartest ass in the dive. Now, though, I wish this was the Spinners doing a song called “Hold Steady.”
[5]

Alfred Soto: Even in 2008, The Hold Steady sounded like a pre-Obama band, by which I mean a bunch of guys who captured a working class that was disappearing in 1984 and voted for Romney. Like the Obama camp their 2010 album sounded defeated and deflated, a victim of its own triumphalism. So they and he need a comeback; the roots of neoliberalism lie in consistently reading working class interests wrongly. So if Craig Finn sounds thinner and perhaps Pro Tooled in ways he wasn’t, the times call for them. The times also demand better riffs, catchier hooks, better signifiers than “big city,” “heartbreakers,” and “French champagne,” which neolibs can afford and the Hold Steady can’t.
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Jonathan Bradley: Last summer, I saw the Hold Steady open for the Gaslight Anthem in Asbury Park, and it made for a bit of a sorrowful moment that had nothing to do with the unseasonable chill. The band that kicked off this Springsteen-revival thing was now the mere warm-up act — in the Boss’s hometown no less — for a band that subbed Craig Finn’s literary bent with classic Hollywood melodrama. It was less a passing of the torch and more a realization that staying positive wasn’t enough and it’s not only the new girls who come up like white unopened flowers. The signs had always been there: keyboardist Franz Nicolay’s departure removed a much-needed dimension from a band whose singer possesses a voice jammed in a single rather non-melodious register. Heaven is Whenever marked the first time Finn’s punks and pimps came off as narrative crutch rather than empathetically drawn parts of a fully imagined world. “Spinners” isn’t quite a return to form, in that it’s too long and the “she” who forms Finn’s subject sounds like a type rather than a woman. (It’s a problem that’s become increasingly apparent on the band’s most recent recordings: “She’s two years on some prairie town/She goes out almost every night” is a sketch vague and anonymous in all the ways the Holly of the first three albums wasn’t.) But the gentler and more-textured arrangement — they’ve never sounded more like Twin Cities-predecessors The Replacements — do much to remind why this band was once the most exciting rock group in America. Not quite a resurrection, but “Spinners” is how the Hold Steady should really feel.
[7]

Megan Harrington: Craig Finn is full of so much horseshit that I wonder if he’s ever spent a conscious night in a big city. Setting aside the image of a former flyover state missy working the room with some full-skirted footwork (because she’s imaginary), the only place you’d conceivably drink both something with a salted rim and something in a frosted mug is Chili’s. In which case, that guy who keeps buying another round is probably her balding, married, thick-tongued co-worker. Shoot for Springsteen and you’ll end up in Jersey City, I guess. 
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