Album Review-“Heaven is Whenever” by The Hold Steady

I would have never thought that the absence of a keyboard player would be so sorely felt, especially from a rock band. When a vocalist leaves, the voice of the band is altered and the strangeness puts an awkward distance between the audience and the band, until the audience reconnects with the old songs in a new way. Instrumentalists are more easily replaced, but their contribution to the songwriting and overall chemistry of the band can be just as identifiable. The Hold Steady has just released their fifth album, and it’s the first without keyboardist Franz Nicolay. The songs on Heaven Is Whenever are missing an element of strangeness, an almost out-of-place oddness that somehow fit nicely in with a given song and brought it to an interesting new presentation, and that strangeness was Nicolay’s contribution. He is as varied an artist as you can get, making music with gypsy punks and klezmer aficionados, as well as playing in The Hold Steady, so whenever a weird sound popped up in a Hold Steady song, I attributed it to him. A great example would be the song ‘This One’s For The Cutters’ off of the last album, Stay Positive, a rock song that prominently features a harpsichord.

The best moments of Heaven Is Whenever escape the history and expectations of the band’s previous work, but more often than not, the good parts of the new songs remind you of older, better Hold Steady songs. It’s growing on me, but it will take a lot to match its predecessors. 6 out of 10.

Where does the week go?

It’s been a dismaying unsuccessful blogging week. It’s not as if I don’t have material, but life has conspired to sap me of energy, motivation, and vital health essences. As an example, my plans to shower my wife with a myriad of wonderful activities and actions for Mother’s Day has been waylaid by my flourishing throat infection. Stupid throat.

Between Max’s short bout of illness this week (which of course threw his entire sleep schedule into disarray) and the stressful events demanding my attention (driving test, moving the sister-in-law out of my house, doing  an interview for a magazine article), I’ve been too sapped to muster up any work ethic for my ongoing concerns.  I’ll try to catch up later.

Friendship is hard when your friends won’t stop whining

I used to duck my head down low and avoid any eye contact when there was confrontation in the room. Whether it involved me or not, I’d hide as fast and as hard as I could. Becoming more comfortable with confrontation has been another surprising side-effect of being a stay at home dad. Not only do I have to confront my little boss throughout the day, I also have to show him how to resolve conflict with other people when we’re out of the house, which means I have to learn to resolve conflict. I have a pretty significant loss on my conflict resolution record right now, but that’s a story for another time and the source of that problem is finally out of my day-to-day life.  Anyway.

Since I’m more likely to speak up and challenge people when they’re being stupid, I’m entering into a new conundrum: learning how to ignore fights that don’t really matter.

I’ve been able to ignore the majority of the incessant whining from one acquaintance (he occasionally earns his way back to the rank of ‘casual friend’ but then torpedoes himself back down to ‘acquaintance’ with his offensive, stupid mouth).  But our shared friend decided to pipe up and join in with the stupid whining last night, and that set me off a little. It didn’t help that the friend was speaking about a kid’s party and the etiquette therein, when he has zero children. I’m not saying that I don’t have a right to be cheesed off at people who open their yaps to spout some nonsense, but the difficulty or danger is that my response will be too enthusiastic. Just because I can now tell somebody to shut up and take their stupid ideas with them, doesn’t mean I need to go to defcon 1 and destroy the friendship over a difference of opinion.

You have to keep in mind that I have decades of deferred rage that will continually push for escape, and I have to keep re-adjusting my temper controls or I’m going to start making a mess.

Related sub-note: I wonder if anyone else has such a complicated set of expectations that go along with the title of ‘friend’? Because I have some high standards, it seems, and if I hold to them with religious fervor, I’m going to have a friend count of 1 (hi honey!).  Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get my meaning.

Unrelated sub-note: it’s still really tricky to choose how candid this blog will be. Will I start to name names? Dish the dirt? alienate everyone I know? Or will I neuter the crap out of this blog to make it my list of inoffensive and uninteresting things?