The Hold Steady Play to Their Strengths on Open Door Policy
Rockers’ latest is their most musically adventurous album yet
Craig Finn has said that the difference between his solo material and The Hold Steady’s songs is often one of scale. With The Hold Steady, Finn seeks big subjects to match the big riffs, while his quieter solo material can focus on smaller moments. If that distinction held true at first, the lines get pretty blurry on the band’s new album.
There are still riffs aplenty, and big subjects, on Open Door Policy, but these 10 new songs mix them in among more textured arrangements and understated details reminiscent of Finn’s four solo albums. The convergence of Finn’s solo sensibility with The Hold Steady’s was probably inevitable: As Finn has become more nuanced in his storytelling, his songs sometimes benefit from a subtler approach. Of course, “subtle” is a relative term for a band whose identity is rooted in adrenalizing guitar riffs and caustic lyrics about ne’er-do-wells doing what they do best.
Finn seems to have retired the recurring characters who populated the band’s early albums, but the people in his songs on Open Door Policy are still scheming and still falling short, held down by the weight of their own faulty preconceptions. Yet for all his subjects’ self-destructive impulses, Finn mostly manages to make them at least a little bit sympathetic: They’ve made their beds, sure, but you still hope they have sense enough not to get in and pull up the covers. Good sense tends to be in short supply in The Hold Steady’s songs, where street smarts are a more valuable commodity for the shady pursuits occupying these characters. Finn’s protagonists are always playing the angles, whether it’s the aspiring actor “trying to make moves” on “Lanyards,” the woman who falls for a junkie singer on “Me & Magdalena” or the software salesman indulging his vices on the road on “Heavy Covenant.”
Beneath the surface-level details of money, fame or a high, all of these characters are after one thing: status. It’s a running theme on Open Door Policy, often with an undercurrent of mordant wit. That software salesman, for example, pitches his products to “hospitals and local governments” to increase their efficiency. “It’s a pretty heavy covenant,” Finn sings, a deadpan skewering of a protagonist trying to make himself believe he’s a crucial cog, even as he scrolls through Tinder and palms musicians money for drugs.