Pitchfork

The Hold Steady weren't the likeliest candidates for success. Pulling together after the demise of the imaginative, verbose, and mostly overlooked indie act Lifter Puller, Craig Finn relocated to New York to start a new band. Holding to his distinctive poet-lost-at-karaoke delivery, Finn-- like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü before him-- began unashamedly mining classic rock radio for inspiration. Surprisingly, it's the latter group you can hear on opening track "Constructive Summer", and not just in its title's resemblance to one of Hüsker Dü's most celebrated songs.

One of the Hold Steady's most direct and thrilling tracks, "Constructive Summer"'s tempo and edge are borrowed from punk artists like Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and Finn's friends in Dillinger Four (in a lyrical reference that will reward all the close Hold Steady readers out there). Here, the Hold Steady retain the successful balance struck by Boys and Girls in America, with Finn again avoiding crowding the band as it continues to grow musically: the ballads are weepier, the rock songs more immediate, the attempts to diversify more striking. While they continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic rock act than should be possible in 2008, there's a tension in this album's lyrics between old-fashioned storytelling and breaking down the fourth wall. Stay Positive is their mostly successful bid to have it both ways.

Stay Positive also returns to the narrative threads that marked 2005's Separation Sunday and Finn's work in Lifter Puller, with murder and mayhem creeping back into the lyrical picture. The polite horn interjections and laid-back blooze licks of "Sequestered in Memphis" are musically joyous, though lyrically the narrator sounds inconvenienced to tell his story-- then hints before the chorus that he's retelling it in a station-house interview, as if he only returns to the chorus a second time at the behest of an interrogator. On one of the band's more ambitious musical diversions, "One for the Cutters", the guitars follow the lead of (no joke) a harpsichord while Finn relates the tale of a college girl who gets high a little too often and starts to party with townies-- no new subject matter there, until she finds out the difference between them and her freshman hookups is a proclivity to stab people.

Songs like "Navy Sheets" or "Lord, I'm Discouraged" are mostly notable for adding new elements to the band's palette, be it new-wave keyboards or uncanny Slash-worthy solos, respectively. Meanwhile, "Both Crosses" adds busy acoustics (with J Mascis on banjo, no less), organ, and whispers of theremin to wrap murky atmosphere around one of the record's central mysteries: The girl haunted by visions of the future (referenced and romanced in the song before, "Yeah Sapphire") overdoes the self-medication for her condition and talks about seeing two crucifixions, one being Jesus Christ. The narrator gets understandably nervous over who will be the second.

Stay Positive's other stories are a little less heavy: The band stretches its comfort zone on tracks like "Joke About Jamaica", adding a little talk-box while nodding to Zeppelin and offering sympathy to girls snubbed by music snobs in its lyrics. "Drive-By Truckers frontman Patterson Hood shows up to sing a bit on "Navy Sheets" and Lucero's Ben Nichols croaks some call-and-response on the chorus of "Magazines", but somehow seems lost. Even as the band grows out of its quirks, its universe seems too impermeable yet to accommodate just any guest vocalist, whether the collaboration looks completely natural on paper or not.

Every Hold Steady record heeds the importance of a killer closing track, but even so, "Slapped Actress" is something special. The band navigates one of its trickier compositions here, with churning, dirge-like guitar chords and a restrained piano performance that complements the song's changes in tone. As his protagonists beat a hasty retreat (to where else but Ybor City again), Finn manages to tie up the lyrical seeds he's planted on the record, and more: In an allusion to John Cassavetes' Opening Night, Finn nods to the fact that being in a touring band can be drudgery ("some nights it's just entertainment, and some other nights it's work"), but finds some new metaphors and new inspiration with Jumbotron-ready lines ("We are the theater," "we make our own movies") that acknowledge these songs belong to the listeners as much as the band.

While its title and lyrics often make Stay Positive sound like a darkest-before-the-dawn kind of record, the themes Finn keeps returning to-- skipping town, starting over clean, resurrection-- all speak to the redemptive power of second chances. When the Hold Steady plead with you to "stay positive," and you consider their unlikely and continued ascendancy, you could do worse than take them at their word.