I have been waiting for years (okay, four) for the next great album written both for and about the club scene (the last one, in my opinion, being The Faint’s Danse Macabre). So when I first streamed Boys and Girls in America, I got pretty damn excited. Hell, even the album artwork made me happy: I took one look at that scraggly indie boy and midriff-baring chick surrounded by falling confetti, and thought, “sweet, this is gonna be the album that brings to light all the social and sexual bullshit that goes down (no pun intended) in the indie music scene. I am going to grin my face off and proceed to rock the hell out.”

And rock out I did. I’m a big fan of catchy, which explains why Boys and Girls in America immediately appealed to me musically. It’s got cascading guitar hooks that feel like they belong in an arena and tumbling organ and piano that feel like they belong in a jazz club or at a Baptist revival. This is NOT material for your average footshuffling indie crowd at some garish industrial venue–it’s the kind of album that makes one wanna dance. It makes me want to stage dive off my bed while playing air guitar to
“Chips Ahoy!“ (dude, a song about stoners betting on a horse named after a Nabisco cookie… brilliant) but that’s because I’m sometimes a little dumb like that.

So, uh, back to the album. Recycling fictional characters Holly, Charlemagne, and Co. from previous releases Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn continues his pattern of Making Shit Up. On Boys and Girls in America, however, Finn’s stories (though they remain clever) are a little less dark, and the background accompaniments are more refined (to the extent of approaching power-pop). The album contains slower ballads that, though somewhat sweet, are still chock-full of allusions to the indie scene and gender relations therein. In the lines “hey citrus/hey liquor/I love it when we come together,” “Citrus” quietly alludes to a certain Chemical Brothers club anthem of yesteryear; in “The First Night,” Finn advises the ladies, “don’t even speak/to all those sequencer and beats boys/when they kiss they spit white noise.”

Though Finn’s statement is poetic and incisive, its attitude of admonishment is part of what constitutes my main beef with the album. I love that Finn and Co. point out certain idiocies committed in the name of indie rock (e.g., boy starts band, fangirl drools over boy, boy fucks fangirl but already has girlfriend), but I also think that, lyrically speaking, Boys and Girls in America is a bit of a boys’ club. The leadoff track, “Stuck Between Stations” starts with an allusion to Jack Kerouac and ends with a eulogy of John Berryman. Brilliant as The Dream Songs were, it annoys me somewhat that the album grounds itself in a reverence for male literary figures and then goes on to suggest, six tracks later, that females “don’t have to deal with the dealers/let your boyfriend deal with the dealers/it only becomes inconvenient/when you wanna get high alone.” And if said boyfriend gets annoying, Finn quips, “there’s always other boys and you can make them like you.”

I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of scenester chicks who employ that modus operandi, or that there aren’t scads of secretly machismo scenester jerks who, in turn, prey on such chicks. I just have a hard time believing that the more upright neo-beatnik scenester guys–you know, the ones who pride themselves on their liberal intellectualism but haven’t read a single female author in the last year–aren’t part of the problem too. Though the album does suggest that this type of male intellectualism ultimately doesn’t solve much (”she said ‘you’re pretty good with words but words won’t save your life’/and they didn’t so he died”) it still comes back (albeit empathetically) to the tired tale of woman-as-victim (”Holly’s not invincible/in fact she’s in a hospital”). In sum, this dance- and thought-provoking album keeps finding its way back onto my decks, but I’m still waiting for a record about the club scene that begins with a nod to Diane DiPrima and then goes on to tell the thinking woman’s side of the story.

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