FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday

FEATURE:

Vinyl Corner

The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday

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ONE of the most acclaimed albums…

of the first decade of this century, The Hold Steady’s second studio album, Separation Sunday, is one I would encourage people get on vinyl, as it is a fascinating concept. Separation Sunday follows the interconnected stories of several fictional characters: Craig (the narrator), Holly (short for ‘Halleluiah’), a sometimes-addict, sometimes-prostitute, sometimes-born-again Christian/Catholic (and sometimes all three simultaneously); Charlemagne, a pimp; and Gideon, a skinhead, as they travel from city to city and party to party. Even though their latest album, 2021’s Open Door Policy is brilliant, my favourite album from the Minnesota band is Separation Sunday. It is such an ambitious and totally engrossing album that you will want to hear from start to end! With the core band of Craig Finn – lead vocals, guitar, Tad Kubler – guitar, Galen Polivka – bass guitar and Franz Nicolay – keyboards in top form, everyone needs to listen to Separation Sunday. It is an album that I heard when it came out in 2005, though I have not listened to it for a while. Before I round up, there are a couple of pretty detailed reviews that show why Separation Sunday is an album that you will want to investigate. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:

“The Hold Steady's Almost Killed Me is their hands-down masterpiece, at least this far in the career anyway. A swirling maelstrom of intense, hilarious, and breathtaking rock & roll, it should have been the album that knocked everything else into a cocked hat in 2004. Of course, it was mostly ignored outside the homes of a handful of indie snobs and adventurous punks, but it's there, it's amazing, and most likely the band will never be able to top it. Separation Sunday comes pretty damn close, though. It is a much darker record, revolving around drug casualties, broken lives, a hoodrat fixation, spiritual and physical dissipation, and general despair, and there aren't as many easy laughs this time out -- but instead the listener gets lots of head-shaking wonderment at Craig Finn's genius lyrics and voice.

His gruff, in-your-ear vocals negotiate the twisting torrent of words like a world-class skater kid. He is insanely literate and insanely insistent: he's like the guy who calls at 2:30 a.m. in a frenzy to holler about his latest disaster of the heart, the bar-stool poet with a religious obsession, or the guy who corners you at a party and just won't shut up about how Boston are the missing link between the Beatles and Derrick May -- only you don't mind because he is strangely brilliant. He is also just about the best rock & roll frontman since Bob Pollard. In fact, the group sounds a bit like Guided By Voices at times, only a Guided By Voices that want to kick your sorry can up and down the length of the bar. Or maybe a GBV that worship Springsteen instead of the Who. Whipping up a classic rock-inspired frenzy of monitor-straddling guitar riffs, dual harmony leads, E Street piano flourishes, and galloping horns, the band behind Finn sounds like nothing less than Jim Steinman's dream group. You could talk about great individual songs (the epic "How a Resurrection Really Feels," the piledriving album opener "Hornets! Hornets!," the weird and almost funky "Charlemagne in Sweatpants"), but the strength of the album is in the flow from song to song and the way the intensity level (which starts off at a near fever pitch) elevates until your head is just about ready to burst from the thrill of it all. Call it a quaint idea in 2005, but Separation Sunday is truly an album, one that sounds almost perfect when played from beginning to end in the proper running order. Block out about 42 minutes sometime, hold steady, and get ready for indie rock -- no, rock & roll -- at its sweatiest, most intense, and most impressive. Long live the album; long live the Hold Steady”.

The second review comes from Pitchfork. Separation Sunday is one of those albums that take quite a bit of listening so you can fully appreciate it. I love its concept and the fact that every song seems to form part of this arc and storyline. This is what Pitchfork noted when they reviewed the4 excellent Separation Sunday:

“The Hold Steady's first album, last year's ...Almost Killed Me, was a tangled mess of damaged character sketches and triumphant bar-rock thump-- Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle reimagined as an epic of Russian literature. But Separation Sunday is something more, the elegiac Biblical lost-innocence junkie odyssey that Denis Johnson never wrote.

Like Fiestas & Fiascos, the final album from Finn's former Minneapolis post-punk band Lifter Puller, it's an album-length story that forces us to pull bits of narrative from Finn's tangles of words. In Separation Sunday, a confused Catholic girl named Hallelujah hooks up with a motley assortment of shady characters, does a gang of drugs, gets born again when some guy with a nitrous tank dunks her in a river, wakes up in a confession booth, and maybe dies and maybe comes back from death. But the real story is in Finn's virtuoso evocations of menace ("When they say great white sharks/ They mean the kind in big black cars/ When they say killer whales/ They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in Penetration Park"), hedonism ("You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar/ And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after-bar"), and brief shining moments of lucidity ("Youth services always find a way to get their bloody cross into your druggy little messed-up teenage life").

None of this would work if Finn didn't have an expert rock band backing him up. Finn's songs wheel precariously from one unhinged lyrical idea to the next, almost never stopping for choruses or going out of their way to fit into any sort of structure, but the band plays these songs like long-lost fist-in-the-air classic rock anthems. It's well-schooled in every bar-rock cliché, and executes these moves with joy and conviction: the pick-slide before the climax, the weeping Hammond organ on the bridge, the pregnant pause before the big riff kicks back in. Since ...Almost Killed Me, the band has beefed up its sound with the help of Rocket From the Crypt producer Dave Gardner and keyboard player Franz Nickolay, and its Meat Loaf pianos, greasy George Thorogood blooz choogle, and wheedling Journey guitar carry more heft and authority than they had on the last album. This stuff would sound great behind just about any garage-rock hack, but it turns Finn's dirtbag chronicles into something epic and huge and molten and beautiful”.

A terrific album that will sound superb on vinyl, it is one that I would nudge people in the direction of. The Hold Steady are still going strong, though I still think their finest release was 2005’s Separation Sunday. I have been listening to it a lot the past few days, and I get a new favourite song each time I pass on through. An album that definitely stands up to dedicated focus and listens, Separation Sunday is an album you should not…

BE without.

FEATURE:

Vinyl Corner

The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday

Sam Liddicott