Consumer Guide Album

The Hold Steady: The Price of Progress [Thirty Tigers/Positive Jams, 2023]
Most of these songs are at the very least interesting, testimony to how deftly Craig Finn changes up his narrative gift. As he's gotten older, not only have his strugglers and stragglers gotten older too, but they've remained discernibly different from each other as their numbers increase. On this album the drug life is no longer front and center, and the musical life is not so much detailed as referenced in passing. A few fleeting protagonists seem to be mercenaries in unspecified conflicts or rootless hustlers ready to break the law in pursuits more evoked than described. Love, which Finn has always made room for, is vestigial if that, and if any of these over-30s has kids they're keeping it from their parole officers. But there's more to him than the downside--now and then a Mr. or Ms. Big gets a cameo. And a passing reference to the unreliability of municipal bonds hints tantalizingly at middle-class vistas I wish he'd detail someday. B+