Revisit of the Week: The Hold Steady - Heaven Is Whenever (2010)
Editor's note #1: After this post the RotW posts are going to take a break. I'm not sick of writing them and they'll be back, but they do take up listening slots that I want to spend on other things. One is that Listmas is of course coming up soon and I want to start slowly preparing for that while revising what 2026 has given us. The other thing is that there's a personal music-related project I've been quietly working on for a while but which I actually want to focus on for a bit. Sadly I'm not a suspiciously wealthy jetsetter without a day job stealing so much of my time, so something's gotta clear space. AotW is it for now.
Editor's note #2: While the last RotW was deliberately picked, I swear this choice was random number generated. It's just a weird universal quirk that I go see both The Mountain Goats and Craig Finn live, talk about Finn in my post about The Mountain Goats album I ended up listening to lots after the concert, and now in this entry I'm talking about Finn's band. Coincidence is weird man.
I have rambled about The Hold Steady in a RotW post before, almost a year ago exactly. I'm going to cheekily copy/paste a segment from that blog entry:
I have tried with The Hold Steady a lot, and I keep trying, but rarely do I get the same rise of feelings and appreciation out of them as I do when Finn's by himself. I don't know why either, it's all very irrational: Finn is still his charismatically wry himself, wrapped around in other people's stories as the omnipresent self-insert narrator in various snapshots in down-on-their-luck protagonists' lives, and the band around him has punch and muscle. The repeated description I see of The Hold Steady is that they're the E Street Band playing punk in a random dive bar, and that's at least accurate of the ethos - and as someone who finally clicked with Springsteen (to some extent) a few years back, that should just make me even more enthused. But as much as I superficially like what they're doing, no Hold Steady album to date has seized me in the same manner that Finn's solo records do. They're the definition of good albums that disappear in my shelf - I enjoy them while they're on but rarely do I go back to them on my own accord instead of e.g. projects like this.
Heaven Is Whenever is Hold Steady album (that is not Boys and Girls in America) through and through, and that means that it gets lost in my shelf until something very specific prompts me to pick one up. But...
The time I have spent with Heaven Is Whenever for this entry has highlighted one thing: that The Hold Steady are a band of micro-level changes that you need to be readily attuned for before you can detect them. All their albums roughly sound the exact same and you know precisely what you're getting into (see the above paragraph in italics for a rough idea), but as you spend more time with each album the more the finer details of their personalities jump out - or politely wave at you, at the very least. In the case of Heaven Is Whenever, it's that this is the band's "gentle" album. Oh it rocks an awful lot and makes so much noise too, but the heart of the record lies in its more somber and mid-tempo moments, of which there are more than your usual Hold Steady holds. We even start with one, as "The Sweet Part of the City" calmly strums and thrums out of the speakers, opening the doors with a soft smile and a steady pace rather than rushing through the gates. Pretty much all of the album's best songs are its slower, or more nuanced ones - the late night wistful bar ballad "We Can Get Together", the contemplative night-time drive atmospherics of "The Weekenders" the mini-epic "A Slight Discomfort", and "The Sweet Part of the City" itself of course.
The rock songs are good too. They're Hold Steady rock songs. I've heard many like them before this album, and there are many more like them on the subsequent albums. Things always get a little more exciting when there's the rest of the band whooping and hollering behind Finn, and there's a lot of that throughout Heaven Is Whenever - it really adds an extra kick to the songs and they're one of my favourite things about this band. But if I were to listen to this album outside a specific project, it'd be those mid-tempo cuts. There's many of those on other Hold Steady albums too, but here they carry the heart of the record and the time I've spent with this album has been time I've spent really falling in love with those songs in particular. They're my key takeaway from Heaven Is Whenever and so when we start listing and describing all the Hold Steady albums... this is the one with the gentle heart. It's a very minute change of pace for the band, but it's one that clicks with me.
Bit by bit, Hold Steady albums begin to reveal their distinct charms.
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