NO!: THE HOLD STEADY (#501, JUL 10 2009).

09/26/20 • -1 min

NO! THIS is what I call music: The Podcast

The Hold Steady "Girls Like Status" (16.7 MB) from Boys and Girls in America Majestic Theatre Madison, WI July 10, 2009 I hate the Majestic and I love the Hold Steady, and love always wins. I'd wanted to shoot video from the main floor for this show, but for a variety of reasons (mainly the woman in front of us who kept whipping her arm back into my face) it didn't happen. But no matter, the show was great as always. It was the second time in the last three shows that they played this somewhat obscure tune -- a bonus track from the Australian and iTunes releases of Boys and Girls in America. Oddly, I think I still haven't seen them do "Ask Her For Adderall" live.

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NO!: THE HOLD STEADY (#502, JUL 10 2009).

The Hold Steady "Yeah Sapphire" (18.1 MB) from Stay Positive Majestic Theatre Madison, WI July 10, 2009 If I'd ever gotten around to writing up my top albums of 2008, the Hold Steady's Stay Positive would've been their second-straight #1. Though not as instantly enthralling and masterwork-level as their previous effort, it was a hugely engaging, progressive step for the band and a victory lap of sorts after the success of Boys and Girls in America. The opener, "Constructive Summer," is the most viscerally inspiring song I've heard in years, while the title track is the band's salute to its scene and its fans, and the positive rage that fuels them both. Elsewhere they add some new flourishes to their sound, particularly on "Navy Sheets." This song is very much in the classic Hold Steady mold, launching with competing guitar and piano lines and giving Craig Finn's poetry some room to stretch; "If I cross myself when I cum/would you maybe receive me?" is one of those lines that implicates love, lust, religion and insecurity the way few other songwriters ever have. I was particularly excited to catch it live because it's one of the songs from Stay Positive that I didn't react strongly to at first, but that's grown on me a lot since the record came out and we saw them last.

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NO!: FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE (#500, JUL 8 2009).

Fountains of Wayne "Hey Julie" (13.9 MB) from Welcome Interstate Managers High Noon Saloon Madison, WI July 8, 2009 What do you do when you bring people up out of the audience to play incidental percussion parts, but then one of them starts singing unsolicited back-up vocals? Apparently, you just go with it. The guy on the right sang, I think, the entire song, and I don't think the band actually noticed. Meanwhile, the scarf-wearer on the left was on stage for the second time of the night -- he was also picked to come up and play a piano line during Jon Auer's solo opening set. About that set: wow, so weird. Auer is best known as the guy from the Posies, and there were a handful of Posies fans in the otherwise inattentive crowd. This is pretty par for the course at the High Noon -- openers get talked over, and that goes double for solo acoustic openers. This makes Auer's decision to play a song unamplified, from the middle of the floor, and facing the stage, all the more inexplicable. He stopped during the song twice to shout at the crowd to shut up (it didn't work, obviously), and even standing right behind him I couldn't hear any of it. He ended his set by covering Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him," which he mocked repeatedly. The whole thing was quite a big fail, which is why the headliners got episode #500 and he didn't.