In which a singer who looks like someone's dad starts acting like it...

 The Hold Steady deal in tableaux. Now onto their 5th Album, the New York band have cornered the market in indie-rock snapshots of drugs, booze and sexed-up 20-somethings in Manhattan. So I came at their latest offering, ‘Heaven is Whenever’ expecting another 12 tales of drug overdoses, hangovers and one-night stands that made their previous albums so damn enjoyable. But something strange is afoot on this LP. It creeps up on you slowly, and isn’t obvious at first glance, but the unthinkable has happened.

The Hold Steady have grown up.

The songs still have the same driving rock and the melodies are still razor sharp (with one serious caveat – I’ll get to that in a moment), but the songwriting has definitely taken a different turn. Take lead single ‘Hurricane J’, where singer Craig Finn advises that it’s better to be “22 and banging round in restaurants than 22 and banging round in bars”... Seriously? Is this the same man who sang about getting so smashed on drugs at a festival that he passed out, woke up in the medical tent and started making out with the first girl he saw? (‘Chillout Tent’) Or who described his marijuana trip as “starting in a vestibule and ending in a hospital”? (‘Hot Soft Light’) You find the same ideas throughout – the fantastic ‘Soft in the Center’ finds him giving some surprisingly zen relationship advice to a guy just starting on dating “I know what you’re going through. I had to go through that too”, while ‘Barely Breathing’ has the band firing salvos against the overly violent nature of mosh-pit shows. It seems that the Hold Steady have finally started to mature a little bit. It’s a strange change, and at times the transition is rather jarring – the aforementioned Barely Breathing comes off as just too preachy – but it’s a surprisingly strong and coherent album. The only track that harks back lyrically to their old songs is ‘Rock Problems’, which sees Finn back on his old stomping grounds – a party in Brooklyn where the music is loud and the drink is strong. But even here his new-found maturity invades – Finn finds himself cornered by a fan who asks if he was drunk at a previous show “since some kids from the net said the sound kinda sucked”. But it safely passes, and he goes back to being drunk again.

So outside of this strange new world, how is the album as a whole? In a word: Fantastic. In two: Bloody Fantastic. The centre of the Hold Steady has always been Finn and his beautifully human way with words. This new mature approach to lyrics has been greatly helped by a renewed emphasis on actually singing – in previous albums Finn has half sung, half spoke his lyrics to rather mixed results (in my view at least – I know some people love his delivery). Heaven is Whenever sees him making a far more conscious effort to actually sing, and the results help drive the songs along better. There is still a healthy streak of D.I.Y Punk running through the band, but this time around it is counterbalanced by a more professional sheen, no doubt in part brought on by some serious mainstream appeal after hits like ‘Constructive Summer’. Which, sadly, brings me to the one downside of this album. The previous albums have been bolstered by some truly stupendous piano work by Franz Nikolay, and his piano lines helped make songs like ‘Constructive Summer’ or ‘Stuck Between Stations’ into amazing tunes. Sadly he left the band before this album, and it really shows. There is a far stronger emphasis on guitar, but the hole left by Nikolay’s departure still gapes. As I was listening to the album, I kept waiting for the beautiful piano lines to sweep in. There are still some good keyboard parts from his replacement, and the melodies on the whole are amazing, but I can’t help thinking how much more fantastic a song like ‘The Weekenders’ would be with their old pianist at the keys. Also the album does deflate just a touch with the softer ‘We Can Get Together’ in the centre – it’s a lovely song, and the sentiments are touchingly sad, but it just goes on a touch too long.

Admittedly though, I’m nitpicking. Heaven is Whenever is a fantastic album, and one that deserves some seriously play from anyone with a love of rock. The more mature direction, while surprising, really helps the album as a whole. Let us hope they continue on such a strain! Go, grab it. You won’t be disappointed. Unless you were expecting the CD case to be full of strippers or something. Then you will be disappointed. Sorry.