“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

To readers of James Joyce, Stephen Dedalus’ epiphany on Sandymount Strand, described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is an apical moment—a passage that resounds beyond itself in proclamation of all that we love in his fiction. So when I saw that the Vancouver rock duo Japandroids had named their latest album after one of the passage’s most recognizable phrases—Near to the Wild Heart of Life—I felt at once an immense surge of excitement and a kind of wary apprehension. The tremendous ambition that Japandroids’ title choice suggests scans at first as more than a little sneer-inducing. Further, it sets the stakes incredibly high. How much of a letdown would The Sound and the Fury be, for instance, if its quality and originality didn’t justify the Shakespearean title?

Although they never could have been expected to “go literary” in such an explicit way, Japandroids’ blasted, fist-pumping noise rock has always evoked, if never before explicitly invoked, the ecstasy that Joyce describes. The new album’s opener—also called “Near to the Wild Heart of Life”—is a characteristic introductory barnstormer, plowing forth in a furious surge of Marshall Stack-ed guitars and David Prowse’s planetary drumming. By the third line, which mentions “a continuous cold war between my home and my hometown,” I was uncritically and overwhelmingly on board, ready to give my life for art, mapping out my plans to drop out of college and follow Japandroids on tour forever, and excitedly anticipating their next album, which, I thought, would probably (and justifiably, and unironically) be called To Be or Not To Be.

There is a certain type of young male, of a particular disposition and musical inclination, that will feel exactly these feelings from the first moments of the album, and indeed frequently throughout. Japandroids make music for agonistic vaunting, for flinging oneself up against the battlements of life and crying out “look and despair!” without irony—without even conceiving of irony. And as on previous albums, this leads to some deeply silly moments. The lyrics contain occasional phrases by turns clichéd and ridiculous, metaphors mixed and abandoned, and punctuated by what would in the hands of any other band scan as self-parodic phatic outbursts (it almost goes without saying in a Japandroids review, but there are  a lot of “whoas” and “yeahs”). Brian King’s got a limited range and a similarly limited register of song structures to build from. But none of this mars the listening experience; and experienced in the proper context (the open road, the sweaty basement), these elements actually enhance it. It’s as though the listener, liberated from the decorum of artistic nuance, experiences something like the pure form of rock and roll, disconnected from any reality-referent and actually better for it.

But whereas Post-Nothing and Celebration Rock occasionally felt one-note from a distance, Wild Heart offers more than merely a very good-but-dumb rock record for post-adolescent boys who want to cut loose—it offers thematic and stylistic dimensionality. For although the title track drops us in media res into a world of “passion and pure provocation” and “bedlam in my bed” (yikes), Brian King’s “fired up” urge to “go far away” reveals itself as a red herring over the album’s course. “North East South West,” which follows, documents the culmination of its predecessor’s “Born to Run” escapism, familiarly describing the band on tour in terms of the hero’s journey. And yet, like wandering Odysseus, King finds true meaning not in the “madness standing in [his] way” but rather in the warm embrace of his beloved waiting for him at home. “Baby the trouble that I get into…” King sings almost wistfully, idling on the threshold, before reaffirming his love: “It ain’t shit compared to loving you.” Later, on the album’s penultimate (and best) track, he reiterates this sentiment: “No known drink, no known drug, could ever hold a candle to your love.”

Is this sappy? No question. But coming from a band that once ended an album with a track surreptitiously titled “I Quit Girls” and whose second single espoused an urgent need to “get to France so [they] can French kiss some French girls,” it feels almost staggering in its earnestness and generosity. More overwhelming still is “I’m Sorry (For Not Finding You Sooner),” in which King intones the title through a vocal filter so distorted that it threatens to overwhelm the sentiment. But the message comes through in spite of its accoutrements—a message of dedication, the purity of which is utterly unmatched in Japandroids’ body of work. King hasn’t “grown up” so much as retooled the unidirectional energy of the band’s earlier work into an internal dialectic—not just of “home” and “hometown” but also of chaos and constant, noise and clarity, sobriety and intoxication, the steady beloved and the vast unknown. These oppositional  forces play out their war throughout the album, with King often cannily casting them in matrimonial terms. In “Midnight to Morning”, he characterizes himself as “born to marry the bottle in a ceremony that lasts forever,” before hedging: “If you’ll hide me and heal me in your sanctuary, I’ll stay forever.” A marriage will occur—but to whom, or what? Earlier, in “True Love and a Life of Free Will,” he describes the instability of this contingency: “Plans to settle down / Plans to up and split / Plans loose as the morals we are planning with.” Japandroids find their new muse in this looseness, careening between the road and the hearth.

In this way, the album justifies its title, or at least makes a complex claim to it. Because although Stephen Dedalus’ epiphany launches him headlong into the world and what he hopes will be a profound artistic career, he reappears in Ulysses as a failed, penniless poet, having returned home to native Dublin with his tail between his legs. Japandroids have recognized in their Joycean inspiration the futility—the impossibility—of the ceaseless raging that their previous two records expertly attempted. Here, the fire turns inward as much as outward; instead of trying to break out of the body (and the hometown, et cetera), Japandroids face their limits—personal and musical—headlong on Wild Heart. That the album is as thrilling as anything they’ve done before comes as no surprise; properly expressed, the journey toward self-knowledge can be as heroic as any other.

Heading into next month’s Academy Awards with a staggering fourteen nominations, Damien Chazelle’s third feature La La Land is poised to win big. In some ways, this praise—which is all but inevitable—will be deserved. On the surface, the auteur’s film is a big-hearted movie about movies (and jazz, analogously) that strives for sincerity and reverent nostalgia. Like a sunnier Birdman, which won Best Picture in 2014, or a more self-referential The Artist, which won in 2011, La La Land pays plenty of homage to its cinematic forebears while implying an allegiance by association.

Yet in spite of its Old Hollywood adulation, the film paints deeply pessimistic portraits of the current states of both the film industry and the music world. Insincerity abounds, and it is up to our heroes—Mia and Sebastian (respectively played by the very famous Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling)—to bring Real Artistry back to the center. Implicitly, in staging this now-familiar drama, Chazelle casts himself as a hero of earnestness as well, heaping on references to the Classics—Casablanca, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Rebel Without a Cause—in a genuflective gesture of pure adulation.

Mia is meant to be one of the good ones, a rare talent with both acting chops and writerly ambitions who’s just waiting to get her lucky break. Instead, she toils in auditions for various dead-end roles, until the alluring Sebastian—a similarly struggling jazz pianist—convinces her to “write something as interesting as [she is].” It’s the setup for a potentially great tale of mutual creativity complicated, as always, by romance. And she does write, or so we are told outright. In fact, “It’s genius!”—at least according to Sebastian after Mia performs her play for him in his bedroom. But the viewer is not afforded this luxury; we must take her auditor at his word, even though we never get to hear a line. And like the play itself—indeed, because of its insubstantiality—Mia’s supposed artistry functions only as a simulacrum: a suggestion of talent, a series of indirect gestures, orbiting around a center that cannot hold because it doesn’t actually exist. Sebastian’s prophetic advice ironically comes true—whatever Mia produces is, for the viewer, just as interesting as her character. Which is to say not very much at all.

At best, Chazelle’s negligence in fleshing out Mia’s artistry reflects the difficulty of writing a good script. In such a case, it demonstrates an ironic recursion: since the flaws of Chazelle’s script are intimately related to the lack of a visible script for Mia’s play, the extra-diegetic nonexistence of the latter might just reflect the fact that it’s too dang hard to write a real script-within-a-script in the first place—I mean, I already wrote one, Chazelle might have said. We can’t all be Shakespeare! At worst, though, he has bought wholesale into the deeply sexist logic that aspiring jazz drummer Andrew, Miles Teller’s character in Chazelle’s previous film Whiplash, uses to justify breaking up with his girlfriend Nicole (Melissa Benoist). “I want to be one of the greats,” Andrew petulantly explains. “And I would stop you from doing that?” she replies. “Yeah.” Whiplash was self-aware about the negative effects of Andrew’s Ahab-like monomania, but Chazelle, whose desire to be One of the Greats is evident everywhere in La La Land, seems blind to his own lesson. Thus a deeply cynical reading aligns Chazelle’s indifference toward Mia’s potential artistic depth with Andrew’s disregard for Nicole: the point is that women get in the way of serious (male) artists, and they should be treated (as characters and as people) secondarily if at all.

But then what do we make of Sebastian, whose earnest love of Real Jazz, vinyl records, and living in bohemian squalor makes him scan as a more grown-up, less egotistical Andrew? “The world doesn’t need any more actresses,” Mia admits at one point. But in the logic of La La Land, it very clearly does need more guys like Seb, who plays the piano (beautifully! on screen! many, many times!) and dreams of opening his own club. Sebastian retains an endearing shred of his predecessor’s petulance, and one of Mia’s major roles in the film (in fact, the only role we get to see her play) is to assuage these tendencies when they flare up. He joins a band to make money, even though he hates the music, and she assures him that the group is actually pretty good. Most touchingly, she moves him to change the proposed name of the club, which he eventually does open, from an obscure Charlie Parker reference to something simpler: Seb’s.

When this is revealed at the end, it’s quite affecting. Mia, now a famous movie star, ambles into a subterranean jazz club with her blandly wealthy and not-quite-as-handsome husband. But lo and behold: Sebastian’s at the piano, resplendent in the spotlight, saving jazz one blue note at a time. He addresses another pianist, a young black man who has just finished playing with his combo: “He might own this place one day if I’m not careful”—but not in this movie, ha ha. And then he notices Mia, his great lost love, whose loss—Beatrice-like—has blended with his love of jazz to realize the club of his dreams, the club that decadent, gentrifying Los Angeles urgently needs. There’s a strong sense in their exchange of gazes that neither could have achieved his or her success without the other, and that even though they’ve parted ways, each will always recognize the other’s impact: Mia, for her Manic Pixie muse service, and Seb, for his gruff insistence on getting her to that big audition, the one that would Change Her Life forever.

This sentimentality is deeply felt, but like all sentiment, it’s manipulative and sophistic. There is, it goes without saying, no correspondent scene in which Sebastian becomes proudly, complexly aware of Mia’s triumphant dream-fulfillment. Chazelle doesn’t seem to care, and since he hasn’t provided any direct evidence that Mia’s work is actually good, neither do we, in the moment. The signifiers of her success— fancy house, fancy car, chatter in the air as she walks elegantly out of a coffee shop—are, however briefly, believable enough. But the signs empty out when the film ends, at which point the narrative imbalance between its two protagonists becomes impossible to overlook or explain away. In this movie that uncritically equates nostalgic reverence with quality in its treatment of both its art forms, Sebastian’s filmic analogue is not Mia at all but rather Chazelle himself, whose move to resurrect old Hollywood tropes and gestures is as regressive and quaint as Sebastian’s studied, pleasant, cocktail-party jazz. For Chazelle, Mia exists—to whatever extent she can be said to—for the same purpose that she serves in Sebastian’s creative arc: to lend grace and beauty, to bring his ego down to earth, and to make this deeply male movie (and Seb’s life) a little less solipsistic. But whereas we appreciate the influence Mia has on Sebastian, the limitations of her role in the film reflect nothing positive whatsoever on Damien Chazelle, her egotistic creator and inevitably Oscar-bound usurper.

[Snippet from “I Left a Woman Waiting”]

In the cover photograph for Death of a Ladies’ Man, Leonard Cohen’s deeply enigmatic 1977 album, the Canadian songwriting legend sits cigarette in hand, framed by two gorgeous women as if in a tableau. His expression is a mix of insouciance, dejection, and smirking superiority. Death of a Ladies’ Man was met with confusion upon its release, but in light of Cohen’s actual death—last month, at the age of 82—it deserves a second look. The album represents a midpoint between the artist’s sparse, insular early work and the visionary, sage-like, and musically adventurous records that followed it.

Produced by an aging and increasingly unhinged Phil Spector, the former AM-pop whiz kid who would eventually be convicted in a 2008 murder trial, the album bears the sonic hallmarks of Spector’s ’60s pop progeny. Heavily gated drums, syrupy string arrangements, and huge choirs abound. Take the doo-wop throwback “Memories”—a self-referential slow-jam in 6:8 with a saxophone solo that nods to “In the Still of the Night.”

[Saxophone solo from “Memories”]

The Spector sound, already atavistic by the mid-’70s, doesn’t quite jibe with Cohen, who was never much of a crooner—let alone a bombastic pop star. But this juxtaposition has aged better than critics at the time might have expected. Death of a Ladies’ Man’s legacy can be felt in the fractured-pop detritus of Dirty Beaches, the Vegas-via-Gothenburg sugar rush of Jens Lekman, and the self-conscious schmaltz of Father John Misty, who penned a tribute to the record on his 2012 debut.

[Snippet from opening verse of “Only Son of the Ladiesman” by Father John Misty]

What sells Death of a Ladies’ Man are Cohen’s lyrics, which at their best here are as good as any he ever wrote. From “True Love Leaves No Traces,” a seemingly romantic ode with a nihilistic bite, to the sweeping nine-minute title track, Cohen’s world-weary missives on the vacancy of love and the diminishing returns of sex clash with the orchestration. Cohen recasts Spector’s sonic signifiers of teenage innocence as gateway drugs to a rock bottom of ultimate decadence.

[Snippet from opening verse of “True Love Leaves No Traces”]

There’s no doubt that this is an indulgent album. And listening to a song like the deeply misguided “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On,” one feels tempted to take this indulgence at face value. But on the whole, the strung-out playboy image that Cohen conjures on Ladies’ Man evokes deep pathos—a near-tragic aspect turned triumphant by the fact that many of Cohen’s best and most daring albums were still in store. For instance, it’s hard to imagine I’m Your Man, the masterful electronic left-turn released a decade after Ladies’ Man, existing without this earlier, even more daring experiment. If I can make it through this, Cohen’s speaker seems to say, I can handle anything. In this light, we might read “Paper Thin Hotel,” Ladies’ Man’s strongest and most exemplary piece, through an autobiographical lens: as a purgative encounter with depravity so total that, perversely, it absolves.

[Snippet from “Paper Thin Hotel” with the line “A heavy burden lifted from my soul…”]

Like E.M. Forster, who began his novel Howards End with the words that introduce this review’s title, the Montclair, NJ-based indie rock band Pinegrove is concerned with building bridges and drawing through-lines. The group, fronted by 26 year-old Evan Stephens Hall, proclaims on its Bandcamp page to be “hard at work in the promotion of introspective partying!”— exclamation point and all. Lest you, dear reader, take this statement as yet another arch millennial ironism, look no further than the group’s truly masterful new LP Cardinal, their first for Boston’s Run For Cover imprint.

Cardinal begins and ends with the theme of friendship and a resolution towards self-improvement. In the twangy opener “Old Friends,” Hall sings about the virtues of a support system: “I should call my parents when I think of them,” he admits. “I should tell my friends when I love them.” Later, on the closing track “New Friends,” his tone is more urgent but no less sincere: “I resolve to make new friends,” he declares. The bulk of Cardinal deals with the passage between these two states, the liminal zone between old friends and new. It’s an album that documents a striving against isolation, and it ends up portraying this struggle as an act of heroic ambition.

Cardinal is not Pinegrove’s first foray into the theme of connection.

The ampersand symbol has featured heavily in their imagery, appearing on the cover of their 2013 & EP as well as on their t-shirts and buttons. Similarly, last year’s Everything So Far compilation felt as much like a sincere demonstration of their full discography’s coherence as it did a marketing strategy corresponding to their then-recent label signing. Cardinal features three of the earlier songs from that album, including a re-recorded version of “Size of the Moon,” but each is appropriately re-contextualized—Cardinal, not Everything So Far, is the album that these songs were meant to appear on.

Hall’s connective attempts are fraught, threatened by those essential and banal vectors of human experience: space and time. These songs bear the indelible hallmarks of a life on the road, a kind of inborn highway transience. “Visiting” exemplifies this trait. Halfway through, the heartland-rock chug breaks down into a low-tempo banjo lilt, only to slowly draw itself together again, building up the momentum needed to careen forth on the ceaseless journey, the mythic

Tour. “City to city!” bellows Hall, as if urging on a transcontinental locomotive, “Montclair and elsewhere!” In other places, language itself fails to satisfy the connective urge.

This failure of language inspires some of the album’s emotional peaks— the vaulting crescendo of “Aphasia” especially, with its pinched falsetto and threat of self-erasure. But the album’s greatest pathos comes from the moments in which all the ingredients for connection seem to be in place, and yet connection remains elusive. This is evident in “Waveform,” a twist on the tear-in-your-beer country ballad in which Hall’s speaker idles on a symbolic threshold: “In a little while I’ll go,” he sings, “Unless you might want to hang a while. Then I won’t.” Hall taps into a familiar, perhaps universal feeling of ambivalence in the face of romantic uncertainty, but his inimitable voice—a high, versatile croon with a hint of adopted Midwestern drawl— elevates this sentiment out of the valley of cliché.

“Size of the Moon,” the album’s longest and penultimate song, follows a similar tack. Its subject matter is the classic fair of gritty realism: two people in a room, drinks, and the miasmic return of good memories soured by context. Like much of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, its lyrics comprise one side of a dialogue: the listener hears the speaker’s questions and confessions, but the presence of another, unheard character is implied throughout. This is the album’s canniest lyrical move—we feel implicated in the speaker’s urge to connect with his addressee, likely a former lover.

After Hall sheepishly asks the addressee to dance or simply talk, we feel the sting of silent, implicit rejection. As his remarks become more unhinged, ultimately tending towards a suicidal fantasy, we yearn to hear a voice call out from the other side—we, too, feel the speaker’s connective urge, even as he spirals into chaos. The arrangement expertly mirrors this rise of intensity; new layers of guitars and vocal harmonies bolster each successive refrain, all of which give way to a scorched-earth hum of feedback and plinking banjos at the end. This plaintive, ruminative lull brings the album full circle: the chiming guitars of “New Friends” begin, signaling the new connection that the song’s title implies. In this atmosphere of rebirth, Cardinal shines in its full splendor. Perhaps “Phoenix” would have been a better title—but then again, no.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I know the members of the band Pinegrove personally, if only a little. The four members of their current touring lineup slept in my apartment last weekend after supporting my band’s album release event at Toad’s. After the show, we grabbed some late night falafel at Mamoun’s and talked about art and literature. By the next morning, I felt as though I had known Hall for years, but most of this familiarity came from the fact I had been listening to Cardinal all week. This is perhaps the album’s greatest selling point, and its ironic outcome: in its spirited internal quest to connect, Cardinal stretches beyond itself. It reaches out to you.

Maybe this was the intention all along. If so, the song “Cadmium” might provide a clue. Its title, a slowly building highlight that appears early in the album, refers to I Send You This Cadmium Red, a book of correspondence between the artists John Berger and John Christie. Over the course of the project that the book documents, the two artists would send each other swatches of paint, drawings, and brief notes, each of which related to the theme of color. The result is an epistolary rainbow, a collection of touching gestures that together tend towards something grand, a collaborative kaleidoscope. On the whole, Cardinal is a similar collection of gestures; it lays its palette bare and invites —sometimes urgently, but always with grace—the fertile spirit of collaboration.

Stacks of old mix CDs clutter the bookshelves of my childhood bedroom. On many, a Belle and Sebastian track served as the centerpiece, encapsulating the kind of tentative introduction to romance that mix CDs represent. Frontman Stuart Murdoch’s characters were like us— young, confused, a little out of step, and simply trying to carve out a place in the chaotic world, often through love. Sometimes I wonder how many such CDs are tucked away in the attics and closets of recovering teenage romantics, and how many nascent loves began to the soundtrack that Murdoch and his bandmates provided.

For many of us millennials, the Glaswegian band’s ninth studio album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, will be their first LP released under our watch. Such a release is an important event for any music fan, a chance to connect with a beloved band in real-time, rather than retrospectively. Unfortunately, for many such Belle and Sebastian fans like me, Girls in Peacetime will also be the band’s first disappointment.

Girls in Peacetime is a pop record. Belle and Sebastian have always based their sound in pleasant pop melodies and simple progressions, but Girls in Peacetime draws its inspiration from a more recent pop tradition than the baroque-inspired sound of their definitive work. One could more accurately characterize the album as an electronic pop record, although this too is not exactly virgin territory for the group. For instance, 1996’s “Electronic Renaissance” experimented with synth textures and electronic beats. They did this again more subtly on their 1998 album, The Boy With The Arab Strap. Still, even on those rather experimental works, Belle and Sebastian preserved their distinctive tenderness: a sense that their songs and the characters within them could fall apart at any time. Not so on Peacetime. Here, garish Eurotrash beats clash with discothèque synthesizers, while Murdoch and assorted guest vocalists strive, hopelessly, to gain some standing amidst this manufactured chaos. “Enter Sylvia Plath” and “Play for Today” are the greatest offenders in this department, and even when the radical aesthetic shift pays off, as on the catchy single “The Party Line,” the band’s identity is lost.

Much of the blame for this can be placed on producer Ben H. Allen, best known for transmuting Animal Collective’s shambolic freak-folk into full-blown synth pop on 2009’s stellar Merriweather Post Pavilion. Allen’s pedigree is impressive, but he’s the wrong fit for Belle and Sebastian, a group that has never been defined by their ambition or their stylistic versatility in the way that an act like Animal Collective has. Rather, Belle and Sebastian works best in humble spaces, with unfussy arrangements that provide room for Murdoch’s delicate voice to breathe. No such space is to be found on this album; even on the tracks without overwhelming electronic elements, orchestral arrangements of layered horns, woodwinds, and strings all but suffocate the fundamentally simple songs underneath.

Unfortunately, the problems with Girls in Peacetime are deeper than the superficial production elements. To say nothing of “Perfect Couples,” the lone song written by guitarist Stevie Jackson, Murdoch’s lyrics on this album have fallen short of the high standard set by the group’s best work. Alternately too aphoristic and too prosaic, Murdoch can’t seem to strike the balance between stargazing romanticism and attentive character craft that the music demands. Murdoch has written openhearted characters before, but the titular “Girls” of Peacetime— frustrated, politically minded, privileged 20-somethings devoid of self-awareness—almost scan as a self-parody of Belle and Sebastian’s canonical character tropes. “When there’s bombs in the Middle East, you want to hurt yourself,” Murdoch sings about the subject of “Allie.” Who’s interested in this person, especially when compared to the expertly rendered main character of If You’re Feeling Sinister’s “Judy and the Dream of Horses”? Allie is a girl who is vaguely upset about strife in the Middle East; this is all we’ll ever know about her.

Elsewhere, Murdoch abandons his characters altogether, opting for a more autobiographical approach—a shift that doesn’t make sense that doesn’t make sense for a songwriter who has built his career around evocative storytelling. Album opener “Nobody’s Empire” is the most exemplary track in this regard; although it checks many of the boxes of a Belle and Sebastian hit, Murdoch’s lyrical narrative about his struggles with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the ’90s just isn’t as compelling as the early songs he crafted during that traumatic period. Ironically, by explicitly telling his own story for once, Murdoch has sacrificed an essential part of his identity as a songwriter: his willingness to reject the temptations of autobiography for the sake of the song.

Above all, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance is a concerning album. It’s concerning in that this was ostensibly the best material that the group could cull together since 2010’s Write About Love. Furthermore, it’s concerning that a band that has been around for nearly 20 years feels so unsure of its sonic identity that they would let their songs be brutally dismembered and aesthetically re-assembled by a producer with whom they had never previously worked. The greatest concern, however, is that Stuart Murdoch will be unable to derive an equally moving, new mode of songwriting as he grows older and more detached from the subjects of his greatest songs. The awkward, decadent mess of Girls in Peacetime offers little hope in that regard, but Murdoch is 46 years old. Perhaps as he continues into middle age, his former genius will reemerge, guiding him on towards untapped songwriting territory. Until then, for listeners of my persuasion, those old mix CDs will have to suffice.

Once Franz Nicolay left The Hold Steady in 2010, nothing was the same for the Brooklyn-based bar-rock institution. On their last album, the relatively low-key Heaven Is Whenever, the group attempted to compensate for the virtuosic keyboard player’s absence by leaning towards ponderous folk on their last album. The recent release of Teeth Dreams, four years after Nicolay threw in the towel, finds the band veering wildly in the opposite direction, emphasizing their hard rock side with the addition of a second lead guitarist, Lucero’s Steve Selvidge. The result is an oddity among the Hold Steady’s increasingly vast and varied discography—an album that favors brute instrumental force over lyrical tact and narrative.

Frontman Craig Finn remains a singular songwriter, but by abandoning the vivid, American mythos that The Hold Steady established on their previous records, Teeth Dreams is rendered a mere collection of pretty riffs and clever lines. In the past, Finn has anchored the characters of his songs in distinctly real places, such as Minneapolis’s Penetration Park or the City Center mall. On Teeth Dreams, however, his subjects merely float by, passing through nameless cities with little direction or urgency.

It doesn’t help the album’s disconnect from reality that producer Nick Raskulinecz, best known for his work with Foo Fighters, slathers the record in unnecessarily decadent polish, stripping The Hold Steady of any semblance of grit. In a display of serious lack of self-awareness, Raskulinecz also adds an unseemly amount of processing to Finn’s voice, only calling more attention to the fact that Finn will never be a great singer in the technical sense.

I suppose it’s admirable that The Hold Steady, now ten years into their existence as a band, are still experimenting with new aesthetics and methods of songwriting. Unfortunately for them, Teeth Dreams feels less like a bold step forward than a sonic and lyrical regression.