CD Review: The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America

It must be a strange thing to be masturbated over by the internet. The Star Wars kid, The Hamster Dance, Snakes On A Plane… boy oh boy, was the internet ever right to endless fawn over those bastards. Right? Anyone?

The Hold Steady know all about internet love. Stereogum has already called their new album Boys And Girls In America the best of 2006, while Pitchfork burst even more blood vessels than usual when it gushed praise over the album. But that's not all - Boys And Girls In America has already seen The Hold Steady as the 21st century Springsteens. Can an album really match the deafening noise coming from towering wall of internet hype? Bizarrely, Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady completely, unequivocally proves that it absolutely can. Sort of. Ish. Look, it's OK…

Maybe it's the cynic in us, but we're becoming naturally weary of CDs that come to us with press releases dripping in so many gushing quotes that the weight of ink alone would be enough to knock a child unconscious. But with Boys And Girls In America, the quotes were a little different - they were from people who should know what they're talking about. "Damn you, Hold Steady! How can any band be this good?" spouted Rolling Stone, while comparisons were drawn with anyone from Van Morrison to Guided By Voices. Could Girls And Boys In America by The Hold Steady really be as good as all that?

The answer to that probably depends on how much you enjoy listening to ruthlessly mainstream mid-1970s FM American radio stations, because - to these ears at least - that's what Boys And Girls In America mostly sounds like. The Springsteen comparisons were spot-on - The Hold Steady revel in the kind of earnest, slightly overblown, inoffensively anthemic powerhouse tunes that made The Boss inspire hero-worship and relentless mickey-taking in equal measure.

Not that that's a bad thing, though; Craig Finn's Jonathan Richman-esque yabber has a habit of rendering most of his lyrics - most of which are of the pretty little everyday vignette variety - incomprehensible at times, but there is such an overwhelming sincerity to the bulk of Boys And Girls In America that it renders The Hold Steady bulletproof from criticism. What kind of monster would kick Bambi in the head, after all.

We'll admit that Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady is full of solid tunes like Stuck Between Stations and Massive Nights, tunes that manage to pack a universal punch, tunes that seem almost machine-crafted to make stadiums vibrate to their sound. But maybe that's the problem - we get the impression that all of those stadiums are going to be in North America. Calling the album Girls And Boys in America was a canny move - we're fairly certain that the only way to make it sound more American would be to slather it in a foot of melted cheese and put it on top of Donald Duck's head.

Don't get us wrong - Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady sounds pretty good when it's on in the background, but we just can't see it working over there, and something tells us that it'll translate over to the rest of the world about as well as Dave Matthews did before it. And he resorted to busking to try and make people hear his songs.