The Hold Steady
Thrashing thru the Passion
Release Date: Aug 16, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Frenchkiss Records
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Album Review: Thrashing thru the Passion by The Hold Steady
Very Good, Based on 11 Critics
Based on rating 8.0/10
At this point, new Hold Steady albums can no longer be taken for granted. After a proud run of six albums in 10 years, the one-time Brooklyn workhorses have settled into a more leisurely, part-time rhythm. Age has cut down their time on the road; they now prefer weekend residencies to touring ("More of our time together is spent playing and performing music than setting up and taking down gear, driving it to the next place, setting it up again," they wrote in a Bandcamp post, sounding like parents newly aware of how precious their time is.) And as either a symptom or a cause of the band's reduced availability, frontman Craig Finn has been dedicating more time than ever to his solo career.
Based on rating 4/5
The band's spent over a decade-and-a-half sharing their stories about those in and out of love, the broken and the bruised. It's business as usual, and business is good The Bible tells us that Samson, last of the judges of the ancient Israelites, was blessed with super-human strength. He slayed a lion with his bare hands. He massacred an entire army of Philistines using only the jawbone of a donkey.
Based on rating 8/10
Reconvening for a full album for the first time in a half-decade, the Hold Steady do sound a bit older on Thrashing Thru the Passion -- an evolution they do not attempt to hide at all, which is to their benefit. It's not so much that the group no longer crank their amplifiers until they bleed and push the tempo to the point that Craig Finn has to rush to spit out his words, although those are developments that are hard to ignore. It's that the Hold Steady seem so comfortable in their skin on Thrashing Thru the Passion that they allow themselves to fiddle with details in the margins.
Based on rating 8/10
It's been five years since the last Hold Steady album and 15 years since the first, and things have changed a bit. To spare the details, the Hold Steady are not really operating like a typical band these days, and it follows that they also haven't made a typical album. Thrashing Thru the Passion, the seventh record from the Brooklyn-based band, is part studio album, part singles compilation. Half of its ten songs have already been released as Bandcamp singles, dating back to 2017, and another couple were shared in the leadup to its ….
Based on rating 3.5
It’s fair to say that Thrashing Thru The Passion is the album that some The Hold Steady fans doubted they’d ever see released. When keyboardist (and arguably one of the band members who made the band’s sound so thrilling) Franz Nicolay rejoined The Hold Steady in 2016 after six years away, the band had seemed to settle into semi-retirement. With Craig Finn‘s solo career becoming ever more prolific, and family commitments becoming ever more important with age, the band seemed happy to stick to weekend residencies (in London, among other places), and releasing the odd one-off track.
Based on rating 6.5/10
For their first album in five years, and their debut record with their "definitive" six-piece line-up, Twin City heroes The Hold Steady have collected their recently released singles series and thrown another handful of fresh new tunes into the mix to create Thrashing Thru the Passion. (C'mon, who signed off on that title?) It's a piecemeal way to approach your first full-length release in half a decade but the results are surprisingly consistent. Always a bar band in spirit and always beloved for their purple period between Almost Killed Me in 2004 through Stay Positive in 2008, Craig Finn's crew have recently become much more a touring concern than a recording band, celebrating those glory years with sell-out three-night stands at various key cities to great acclaim.
Based on rating 3/5
You're safe with The Hold Steady: press play on any of the six-piece's now seven albums, and it'll be a assembly of characters' tales told via tracks which on first hearing sound jolly enough, but thanks to both the lyrics and frontman Craig Finn's burr, are awash with more than a tinge of melancholy. Half of 'Thrashing Thru The Passion' has already been released, so it's only half the record that'll be new to any fans - and seven albums in, The Hold Steady are very much a band for their existing fans. There's not anything here, whether the bar-room blues of 'Blackout Sam' or the jazz hands-aloft 'T-Shirt Tux' that's likely to win outsiders over.
Based on rating 6/10
Despite a five-year absence, it only takes a few seconds for The Hold Steady to fill us in on a new cast of deadbeats who can't seem to get their way. That brief time is just enough for the Brooklyn bar band staple, led by knowing wordsmith Craig Finn, to revere the everyman. Opening with a familiar guitar chug, album opener Denver Haircut remains true to the band's sound, where Finn puts the focus around the unfortunate circumstances of a wandering punk as his band backs him with a triumphant performance.
Opinion: Excellent
Y ou don't listen to Hold Steady albums - you live in them. Craig Finn's barstool-rock raconteurs' six albums so far have been engrossing adventures through an America full of delinquents and dreamers, their stories sketched into bolshy, blue-collar indie singalongs. It's a formula that's served the group well: with the exception of 2010 misstep Heaven Is Whenever, the Hold Steady have operated with a dependability befitting their band name since forming in Brooklyn in 2003, amassing a devoted cult fanbase in the process.
Opinion: Very Good
I fell for The Hold Steady early and hard; it was like your office IT support started jamming out vintage, shivved-edge rock'n'roll; bolting Hüsker Dü fuzz to Springsteen's early storytelling. It was heady shit. Craig Finn's declamatory, unabashed un-singing of grimily wry tales; full of sex and concrete and drugs and proper street rats, was offset by the gorgeous chiming piano melodies and moustachioed swirl of vaudevillian Franz Nicolay, who came on like three members of the E Street Band all at once.
Opinion: Fairly Good
Yesterday (if this review runs when I think it's going to) you would have seen my interview about why I picked The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America as my top album of the 2000s. Not only is it my favorite album of the 2000s, but every album they put out in that decade made my list. I am a huge fan of theirs, even the albums Heaven is Whenever, which got a two-star review on this site, and Teeth Dreams, which is hardly a fan favorite.
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