HELLO! Welcome to Offbeat’s brand new blog. We’ve decided to kick off by running through each of the exec’s favourite album of all time, and as President I am FIRST UP how exciting. So here we go.
I’ve picked the Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday, their second album, released in 2005, for many reasons. First and most important is that whenever I’m asked, I say this album. And it’s the truth – I may have listened to other albums more, I may not have grown up with it, it’s perhaps not a ‘cool’ choice – but it IS my favourite, I can sit down at pretty much any time, in any mood, and Separation Sunday will match that mood, and the 40 or so minutes of it will go by in almost seconds.
I find it pretty much impossible to talk about music on any theoretical level, and sometimes I feel guilty talking about all these complicated, groundbreaking records as I can’t even read music, let alone understand it, except on an emotional basis. Which is good in a way, as almost all of the Hold Steady’s albums are based on filtering deep, interwoven and pop-culture filled narratives through old, almost recognisable guitar riffs, the music itself not particularly experimental, in fact purposely NOT so I think. But anyway – the album itself. THS have an underlying, rather ambiguous narrative through every single one of their songs, which on the first few listens seems to be just about being AMERICAN and LONELY and DRUNK and ON DRUGS and THROWING IN OCCASIONAL LITERARY REFERENCES. Which in itself is still rather amazing, and a lot of the time the lyrics work on a more anonymous level, a lot of the events and feelings Craig Finn sings about (aside from being American, I guess), well, I’VE felt them, and experienced them.
But then (well it took a while for me) it hits you, that certain characters keep coming up, and these characters seem to be going to the same places, and the countless biblical references all start to tie together and you realise that over their something-like sixty song career the Hold Steady have been telling a very individual story, sketching little pieces of lives then revisiting a certain event two, three or four albums later. And importantly, it’s a FANTASTIC story, about a good-girl-gone-bad called Hallelujah (or Holly as Finn eventually calls her), who gets caught up in “some complicated things”, falling in love with the drug dealer Charlemagne and then gang member Gideon, and Holly’s kinda the heroine and kinda Jesus and kinda Judas too. There’s so much going on, even just on this one album, which tracks her descent into addiction and basically being a MESSED-UP-GIRL and then the last song’s a resurrection scene (this band does maybe the best album closers of any artist EVER). But it’s nowhere near as simple as this and her ‘rebirth’ is pretty much a hollow gesture and no-one’s any happier than where they started but ANYWAY I could write for hours about the story but I won’t.
One of the things I like most about both the Hold Steady and about the story they tell is how there’s a focus, how (and I know it sounds silly) there’s a SCENE, a musical scene, a community of people and bands that all come together around certain art and how the music isn’t just something you hear in the background, but an active part of life, and it has specific connotations and MEANING and stuff, it’s something to be a part of, whether it’s the 90s hardcore scene that Finn places his characters or the ‘Unified Scene’ who obsess over the Hold Steady and follow them across the world, who’re probably bigger fans than I. But this is one of the things I love about Offbeat at Warwick, how it’s a group of people with similar personalities and taste who’re thrown together and then suddenly they’ve become your best friends and some of the best moments of your life have come with this disparate group of people, all because something so ambiguous a label as an “indie/alternative music society” has brought you together into an actual something. And this is what I hope will continue to happen while I’m President, that the little scene we’ve got going will continue to go and grow, and that new people will come in and find the most amazing, interesting people, and they’ll end up sitting on each other’s floors listening to old records and falling in love and it’s all because of MUSIC.
No comments:
Post a Comment