The Hold Steady - "Chill Out Tent" - Yay or Nay

Yay, of course.

nay nay nay

way to misspell the song title, lol

i vote yay! it's fun!

I should note that I actually enjoy it OK live, when Fred and Velma aren't singing on it.

Oh man stephen, that's embarrassing. :)

. . . and I've been spinning the record all week, especially this track.

Thanks for setting it up. I'm voting "Yay" for two reasons. 1) I liked it when I first heard it. And 2) there's always something even more satisfying about getting into something you know in some way kinda sucks and the poeple that hate it have a point but you still like it anyway.

The other song I feel this way about is "Civil War" by Guns n' Roses. I've watched friends go ballistic over how much they hate the Dizzy Reed juke-piano at the end, how they think that cheeses up the song. And they're right. It's awful. But somehow that awfulness makes it even better. Especially watching them run for cover. (though even i wince at the "never fell for Vietnam" part. Yeah, Axl, no one's putting one over on you. And glad to know you went numb when they shot Kennedy. You were always out the feeling...

now back to Chillout Tent!

yay, great song; and if someone has an opinion on whether the lyrical switch I mentioned on the other thread ("I never saw that boy again" to "I must find that boy again") actually happens on the record, I'd love to hear it.

and "Civil War" is an amazing song that sucks in no cogent way

you like the piano bit?

hell yeah I do, whole damn song is fabulous

ok.

this wasn't needed.

define "need."

there were like 30 posts on this already in boys and girls thread. i'm just getting tired of pointless polls clogging new answers and i don't want them to hide them all cause there are some good ones. anyway don't let me rain on this parade. i voted nay fwiw.

yay yay yay

(if only to cancel out Matos' naysaying!)

Yay just for how Finn intones "they flooded her with saline"

i won the first 2 albums by mistake on a bbc6 competition. they're frightful. but anyone who would like to send a self addressed envelope to me is very welcome to them, it would give me a warm inward glow.

^ban

okay i'll pay the postage. whatever it takes. i am serious p.s.

hahaha...

Yay.

How did you win the albums "by mistake"? I've never mistakenly won anything!

entering competitions is like a reflex action for me. i don't think i even knew what the prize was. i also won the last andrew bird album, which i've succesfully listenened to a few times.

I won a whole bunch a stuff on 6music while i was doing my dissertations this summer. I'm pretty sure I've listened to all of them once and no more.

and definitely yay.

Yay! It's Grease all in one song.

The piano flourish that follows the line "to meet some boys and maybe eat some mushrooms/and they did and she got sick" doesn't sound like a convincing enough representation of someone getting sick off of mushrooms.

Lifter Puller did this well in the second song on Fiestas and Fiascos, when they use 30 seconds of synth to depict a raver kid smoking crack.

i wonder if oranges and cigarrets are a good cure for overdose

Yay! Yay!

Just heard it. Awful.

NAY. Of all the records I own that I like listening to straight through, BAGIA is the only one with a song I religiously skip. Guest vocals are bad, and the lyrics ring so false. Finn walks a pretty fine line with being a 40-year-old dude who sings about teens and 20somethings, and in this song he falls right off the fucking cliff.

I disagree about "Chillout Tent," which I think is a great song. But the last line of your post -- "Finn walks a pretty fine line with being a 40-year-old dude who sings about teens and 20somethings . . . " -- is right. Sooner rather than later, Finn's going to have to start writing about something else, or at least modify his perspective on it. But after three discs, and hitting a pretty big high on Boys & Girls in America, I think a change in perspective might be a very heathy development in Finn's lyric writing.

"Yay," by the way.

these are the type of new Hold Steady songs that almost make me retroactively start disliking the old songs that I actually like.

<i>But after three discs, and hitting a pretty big high on Boys & Girls in America, I think a change in perspective might be a very heathy development in Finn's lyric writing.</i>

I know I just sound like an old grumpy Mpls dude, but the schtick has always been the same, and yeah it is wearing thin, but you can throw all the Lifter Puller discs in there as well.

i wonder if oranges and cigarrets are a good cure for overdose

It seems like the combo would make you very acid refluctic.

The piano flourish that follows the line "to meet some boys and maybe eat some mushrooms/and they did and she got sick" doesn't sound like a convincing enough representation of someone getting sick off of mushrooms.

Aw, I disagree, I love that part. And I like this song.

The only awful bits are the weirdly tepid "guest vocals." Like most Hold Steady songs, I like what it's about but can't get past those vocals. Do you think they heard the song before they put them to tape?

Yay.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cc/Number23.jpg

I will never understand the love for this song, and I'm a huge Hold Steady fan. Oh well, to each their own.