Recap The Hold Steady at First Avenue

“We are The Hold Steady, and we’re gonna have a good time tonight!”

Usually when a singer introduces his band like that on stage, it’s just a platitude, an easy way to warm up the crowd. But when Craig Finn says it in Minneapolis, and particularly at First Avenue, you can be damn sure he means it. In strict terms of residency, The Hold Steady might be a New York band, but its heart has always been here in Minnesota. That’s hardly a secret, of course—Finn has been mining his Minneapolis past for lyrical material ever since he and fellow expat Tad Kubler formed THS out of the ashes of Lifter Puller, using it as an essential backdrop for his long-running, loosely connected song cycle about being young and down-and-out. The passing of years makes the theme increasingly nostalgic and hazy with each successive album, but it doesn’t seem like Finn will drop it anytime soon—not when Heaven Is Whenever kicks off with a line about living on Hennepin Avenue.

So when The Hold Steady comes home to the bar one block away, they own that stage. And that’s because we Twin Citians own The Hold Steady. Never mind New York; these guys are ours. “I don’t think anyone understands what we’re talking about half as well as you guys do,” Finn acknowledged during “Little Hoodrat Friend.” Finn makes an unlikely rock star, dressed in a black button-down short-sleeve shirt like a guy from the IT department who’s busting out a few of Mick Jagger’s moves. He had a look of pure joy on his face the whole night, and it was mirrored in the ecstatic mood of the audience, which burst into explosive life for the headliners after an appreciative but more subdued response to openers The Meat Puppets. The crowd clearly knew all the songs by heart and sang along to every syllable.

As passionate as the band was, though, it’s hard not to feel like it’s been creatively spinning its wheels for a while now. Some of that is the loss of keyboardist Franz Nicolay, who left last year before Heaven Is Whenever was recorded. He lent a subtle but important eccentricity to their sound, and not having him on Heaven exposed the sameyness that is The Hold Steady’s Achilles heel. Finn is an often brilliant lyricist adept at mixing real pathos and wisdom with hilarious and snarky turns of phrase, but he’s a very nasal vocalist with a limited range, and often gets over more on charisma than melodic finesse. And it’s hard to disagree with the notion that, in the long run, the band would be well-served to broaden its sound and write less about its past and more about its present.

That’s less of a stumbling block live than it was on disc, with Kubler and Finn leaning more heavily on the classic-rock riffage that animates their loudest, rockingest material. Any carping about its limitations aside, it’s undeniable that The Hold Steady knows how to rock, and rock hard. One of the recurring themes on Heaven is the way music can be a life-affirming force—Finn surely knows well The Smiths’ old admonition about not forgetting the songs that saved your life. Live, they preach that gospel like believers burning with the true flame.

Finn, who’s 39, also uses his lyrics to grapple with the problem of aging gracefully in what’s often a youth-oriented lifestyle, something that The Meat Puppets know very well. Curt Kirkwood was one of the most incendiary and fluidly versatile guitarists to emerge from the 1980s punk scene, and he showed he’s lost little of that during a set heavy on solos and old classics, like “Up On The Sun,” “Plateau,” and “Lake Of Fire.”

Retribution Gospel Choir, the feedback-heavy side project of Low’s Alan Sparhawk, opened the show with a set of passionately loud, crunchy rock that shared a lot of the same heart as the headliners.