Craig Finn's heart is clear. And his eyes are full.
Maybe his eyes are clear and his heart is full too.
The Twin Cities raised agitator best known as frontman of Brooklyn based The Hold Steady proclaims as much as he ushers in 2012 with his first solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes. With a title that sounds like a New Year's resolution ready to be fulfilled, we get the first hints of departure from the boozy punk and classic rock bent of his full time band.
Recorded in Austin with the help of producer Mike McCarthy (Spoon) and musicians from Heartless Bastards, White Denim, Centro-matic, and Phosphorescent, Clear Heat Full Eyes adds up like the sum of a Georgia Satellites + The Clash + Uncle Tupelo mixture to form a kind of a hipster roots rock. The sounds range from the jumpy roadhouse of "New Friend Jesus", to the Stones-like bar blues jangle of "Honolulu Blues", to the down right Grateful Dead-ish licks of "When No One's Watching".
Finn's voice has a nasal huskiness that feels at home in the dirty twang and dusty shuffles of Full Eyes, dispensing his literate wit as bleary, but not blurry wisdom from the last bar stool in the honky tonk instead of his usual punk club hangout. The vocals are delivered less as antagonistic speak-sing shouting and more in the range from suggestive loud talking to muffled party banter.
Instead of reaching for the Hold Steady's celebratory flashes, the arrangements are more bare and open, but still with an ascending bigness that nods toward a Minnesota Bruce Springsteen rather than the hero of Finn's home state, Bobby Dylan.
Lyrically, Finn touches frequently on religious imagery as co-mingled with popular culture and everyday circumstance, weaving in some character based stories like "Jackson" with more personal fare. His pious mutterings come off more as a middle aged altar boy still miffed at Sunday school contradictions rather than someone about to bring down the church. All grown up, Finn is like your company's IT guy who lets his part-time preaching spill out while he's rebooting your computer from a blue-screen-of-death. His skill is in building characters (Biblical and of his own making) into action heroes that come to life in a mix of simplicity and profundity. On Clear Heart Full Eyes, these figures (sometimes Finn) come across more as the alcoholics who are recovered and disillusioned as opposed to the party kids and junkies depressed and still using.
It is this storytelling, of the kids on the margins who are less depressed by the loneliness it brings than they would be as part of the mainstream, mixed with well-read quips and droll one-liners that consistently captures even the cool kids admiration. On some listens, Full Eyes might be heard as a slowed down Separation Sunday turned down to 5, slowed by 20 BPM, and recorded in Texas.
The alt-country tendencies of Finn's inaugural solo project blends a new aesthetic that add to his songwriting, lending new images of "getting through" into his stories. In the end, what resonates is music as catharsis. Where a bands frontman can be as important a figure as Jesus and the coping mechanisms don't get any more appealing with elevated age and adulthood. As Finn sings on "No Future", "there's one thing that's certain / the devil is a person", most likely the one staring us back in the mirror. But don't fret; keep your heart clear.....and your eyes full; it's "hard to suck with Jesus in your band".
