regarding that dissonance

Mid last week, I wrote a very short post on my first listen to a Lifter Puller record, describing it merely as “dissonant.” Here, a few more deserved words, at least with respect to this aspect of the band that came afterward.

The inherent abrasive quality of The Hold Steady’s music is part and parcel of what gives them a “sound”; it’s something that holds each of their songs together and begins to give it an identity that can’t just be easily bundled away into a genre. (Go on and give me shit for saying this, but it’s what separates them from, say, Band of Horses.)

At the same time, there’s a disconnect between what makes up a Hold Steady song and what in my mind really characterizes a song in a non-experimental sense. This struck me tonight as I was listening to a track that I consider an incredibly well-put together, living and breathing song: the Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies).” Here is a song that marries a number of separate things, all difficult to nail, and puts them into one entity that’s ultimately complex but sounds competely simple and reasonable to the listener. The lyrics are poetry; they’re somewhat obtuse while still making sense if you don’t think about them too hard. (If you choose to think about them too hard, they’re as ripe for the picking as any decent novel.) Add in some well-placed harmonies and a number of different instrument parts that come together in a way that sounds orchestral without sounding slick, and you’ve really got something magical. You’ve got something that really feels easy; you’ve got yourself a song. It’s a lot to handle at once, but it’s got to feel like it was absolutely meant to be.

Now, this is no argument that The Hold Steady are in any way meant to sound like The Arcade Fire; in fact, both bands have managed to garner the same continued comparisons on their most recent records, which is really interesting if you pause to examine it just a bit. Where on their debut album, The Arcade Fire were pushing a line between mainstream likeability and the kind of esoteric craft that Neutral Milk Hotel once perfected, Neon Bible is a collection of solid and likeable but mostly forgettable songs. By comparison, Stay Positive is suprisingly melodic after making your way through most of The Hold Steady’s body of work; you start to feel a real sense of verse and chorus and singalong-song that works in a much less jarring manner than before.

Where those two points converge, apparently, you get a Springsteen comparison.

Springsteen’s works, like the aforementioned Arcade Fire track, revolve mostly around taking what you think is an ordinary rock song and building it, so that what sounds simple and easy is really a bunch of little songs in one, all coming together to make something truly grandiose. The examples here are easy, all you have to do is look at “Rosalita.” It’s sprawling, it’s epic, but it’s also a song to sing along to. It sounds absolutely simple until the day you’re listening to it and you really realize just how long it takes to get to that favorite fist-pumping part about the record company and the big advance. This is a song.

All of this said, it’s this dissonance that in part makes The Hold Steady who they are as a band, but at the same time it’s what separates them from this notion of song as something at once both intricate and immensely palatable. It’s what keeps the average listener (or so I think!) from being able to engage in their songs as one might engage in a standard work of fiction: to lose oneself in it so completely that you forget the world in which you live, and in turn become colored by the moral and emotional canvas of the world inside that work.

These songs don’t ever quite give you that opportunity – at least, not on the first couple of albums. I think the idea of the sonic dissonance here – that jarring disconnect between guitar chords and spoken-word, barely sing-song vocals – pairs itself with its subject matter for a purpose. Here, you aren’t being challenged to enter another world so much as you are being asked to examine your own.

~ by 365holdsteady on September 4, 2008.