The Hold Steady

NYC Brooklyn Bowl Annual four-day Weekender, condensed to two nights.

Perhaps the strangest eventuality of the pandemic is watching hundreds of Americana bar-rock fans from exotic locales around the globe gathering virtually in a Brooklyn bowling alley to dream of being at London’s Electric Ballroom. In a normal year

The Hold Steady would be holding their annual four-day Weekender there. This virtual replacement – performed over two days to a bank of screens showing kids, grandparents, drunks and scary clowns dancing along at home – is as misty-eyed and celebratory as Craig

Finn’s mile-a-minute beer gossip lyricism.

Opening on the Floyd-like atmospherics of The Feelers from their brilliant album Open Door Policy, they construct a set showcasing the moves they’ve made far beyond the charging blue-collar rock of their 00s breakthrough records. Magazines is pure drama rock, Blackout Sam urbane country, T-Shirt Tux a drug-dirty swing, and in Stevie Nix street poetry is drenched in Zep riffage and downbeat jazz segments. They really fly, though, when finding majesty in sawdust; when a brass section joins them for canyon roof choruses on Spices, Sequestered In Memphis or Your Little Hoodrat Friend. In this vein they have showstoppers aplenty. Stuck Between Stations and glorious gambling anthem Chips Ahoy! are so transportive that we could be standing on Camden’s stickiest floor once more.