"I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again," Craig Finn blurts out at the beginning of Teeth Dreams, the sixth LP from the Hold Steady. Over the years, the Cityscape Skins—a fictional coterie of tattoo-emblazoned Twin Cities street toughs—have darkened the doorways of many a Hold Steady song. But, beyond a fleeting reference to a Skins-stocked Youth of Today show on "Barely Breathing"—from the faintly disastrous Heaven Is Whenever—it's been some time since Finn got the gang together. Teeth Dreams' opening line is a callback, a homing beacon to wayward fans left cold by the overblown, undercooked Heaven. That beautiful shit Finn used to talk? Those beer-battered barroom floors and sloppy upper-Midwestern hagiographies? That neurons-blazing, every line-better-than-the-last Minneapolis mythos? The gang's all here.
After four good-to-fantastic records in five short years, the Hold Steady took their sweet time and returned with 2010's Heaven, a too-sleek, saccharine, cliché-mottled shrug of a record. Heaven's music felt bland and tentative, but its real crimes were strictly lyrical: Finn swapped out the character-defining specifics for faceless generalities and an all-too-sweet sincerity that effectively transplanted his lived-in Minneapolis-St. Paul mythologies to Anyplace USA. At his best, Finn wouldn't just set a scene, he'd introduce you around to the regulars. Those first few Hold Steady records still feel like a gathering of familiars, speaking a shared language. Heaven, then, was clearly the Hold Steady's attempt to cram a few more people into to the party. But, by swinging for the back rows, they seemed to neglect all those weird kids up front, the very ones who'd helped make their singalong songs into scriptures.
From its opening line on, Teeth Dreams announces itself as a return to form, a righting of Heaven Is Whenever's manifold wrongs from the cold comfort of the upper Midwest. Squint a little, and the familiar scenery starts to take shape: the nitrous tanks under the overpasses, the Michelin in Bay City where Gideon's been working. "I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You" finds Finn offering a new love a guided tour of some old haunts; "The Ambassador" swings around a chorus of "you came back to us/ South Minneapolis." Even when they're not ticking off the hours in 3.2 bars, the people of Teeth Dreams are very recognizably denizens of the Hold Steady universe: "I'm pretty sure you recognize these guys," Finn shares on "The Ambassador". They're a little older now, but wiser? Well, they're still sorta working on that. They have their good days, their bad months, their off years. Oh, and they drink. Just maybe not quite so much as they used to.
Produced by Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Evanescence), Teeth Dreams is handily the Hold Steady's worst-sounding album. The muddy, hyperbolically compressed mix dies a thousand deaths through a couple of halfway decent speakers; it opens up a smidge in headphones, but it strangles most of Finn's exhortations and grounds Tad Kubler's skyscraping solos, casting everything in an ugly, nuance-deadening grey. Musically, Teeth Dreams is pretty much your standard-issue late-era Hold Steady LP: a post-Replacements hard-charger here, a swaying, Schlitzed-up ballad there, all of it sturdy, none of it remotely surprising. The hard edges of Separation Sunday have been sanded down; the soaring expanses of Boys & Girls in America have been dulled under Raskulinecz's heavy hand. Finn's delivery, in particular, gets swallowed up here: Raskulinecz buried his way back in the mix, forcing him to fight his way out of Kubler and new axeman Steve Selvidge's six-string entanglements. With so much of the music taking the path of least resistance—and without Finn up front, cracking wise to the clever kids—Raskulinecz's bizarre production seems hellbent on downplaying exactly what makes the Hold Steady the Hold Steady. Coming off a four-LP hot streak, Heaven Is Whenever was a tough record to hear. But Teeth Dreams, with its dishwater-dull, Finn-diminishing sonics, might be the harder album to actually listen to.
The collection does find Finn back among the third-shifters and the bartender's friends he spent so much time with on those first few Hold Steady LPs. But things, as they'll do, have changed. For starters, he's no longer into naming names: Gideon and Holly—whose addled ambling make up most of the first three Hold Steady LPs—have quickly become "he" and "she," just a couple more pronouns in the crowd. Finn may not be writing about Holly and Gideon anymore, but he's clearly writing about people like them; they live in the same places, know the same people, favor some of the same streetcorners. Having an overarching plot to hinge these episodes around gave a record like Separation Sunday its novelistic depth; Teeth Dreams, comparatively, feels muddled, 10 thumbnail sketches of the down-and-out rather than one long, hard-fought journey towards redemption.
Still, Teeth Dreams isn't meant as a redemption story; instead, it's a record about perseverance. Nameless or not, these people have clearly been through something; for the time being, they're trying to get over it without falling back under it. They find themselves in codependent relationships with complicated backstories, they take—and then try to shake—dope, and they're all stricken by what Finn, on "On With the Business," dubs "that American sadness." These are people who've been seriously rocked by life, but they're mostly past that now; they're taking it one day at a time, with a friendly assist from the "salted rims and frosted mugs."
"Spinners" finds him advising a recent divorcee to get back out there; "it's a big city," he insists, and "there's a lot of love." But his sympathies get the better of him on the the faintly Dylanesque "Wait a While"; different woman, similar situation, yet—in an unchracteristically regressive turn—he's taken to calling this one "little girl" and reminding her "there's other words than yes." On "Big Cig," Finn conjures a pill-popping, mind-changing, value-minded chain-smoker of his recent acquaintence: it's an easy highlight, the kind of impossibly clever, unusually tender character study Finn's always excelled at.
But for every "Big Cig", there's a "Runner's High",a half-told, half-remembered California-by-way-of-Texas dope deal gone horribly awry. Time was, you could hardly get through a Hold Steady song without an intimate knowledge of everybody's sister's names and what high school they dropped out of. But "High," like a lot of Teeth, plays things a little close to the chest; you don't have to guess at anybody's motivations, but you never quite get to know the people in these songs the way you did all those would-be DJs at the Swish and all their little hoodrat friends.
Dreams about teeth are typically interpreted as stemming "from a fear of rejection, sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old." We're probably better off ignoring those first two, but for a band like the Hold Steady—who've seen their share of divorce, disease, and abrupt departures over the years—time's inexorable march can't ever be too far from their minds. The people in Craig Finn's songs have gone through plenty themselves: from the poppers, pills and Pepsi of the early days to the post-breakup malaise and routine regret that hangs over Teeth Dreams like a fog. You can't say they've aged gracefully, exactly, but they've done the best they could, and things do seem to be looking up.
The best thing about Teeth Dreams is seeing these people succeed, even in the smallest of ways. But it's those same small, steady steps that hold Teeth Dreams back. There are triumphs here, but they're modest; there is, after all, little fanfare to be found in just getting up and on with it day in and day out. Consequently, Teeth Dreams—even more than the flavorless Heaven Is Whenever—occasionally feels like the first Hold Steady record that's just going through the motions: introducing a few punchy chords to a few wayward souls and letting them get on with it. All that desperation, redemption, and triumphalism you'll still find on the Hold Steady's first few albums has become a kind of everyday pragmatism here: not every night, he seems to be saying, needs to be so massive.
It's this, I think, that keeps Teeth Dreams from being a true return to form: these people don't especially seem all that keen on going back to their old ways, even when they're not exactly sure how to make those changes stick. Teeth Dreams goes out on a high: "Oaks," a sweeping, epic-length chest-clutcher, depicts two star-crossed addicts who may not even make it down the block without copping something they know they shouldn't. Like the Hold Steady themselves, they don't always get things right, but it's hard not to root for 'em anyway.
