There was a time, several decades ago, where Bruce Springsteen was rock’s great storyteller. It’s entirely possible Craig Finn now holds that title.
The band’s ninth album, The Price of Progress continues Finn’s grand tradition (whether on solo albums or with the Hold Steady) of telling stories and imbuing them with specific details that bring them to life. Some of the songs are about people you know, or could be—the friends who want to be more, the unemployed guy who can’t bring himself to tell his girlfriend he stopped going to work weeks ago—while others are specific stories about travelers, a musician playing in a foreign country, a rock star manager who lives in a halfway house. You can envision these people by the time Finn is done telling their tale, and that takes skill.
It's all compelling lyrically and held together by fine, if unremarkable, rock and roll. The approach works well on “Sideways Skull” and “Grand Junction,” the opening two tracks, while the waltz “Distortions Of Faith” skates by on charisma and smoke. Closer “Flyover Halftime” is genuinely thrilling, though, a rousing sports story about a drunken fan who storms the field and becomes a sort of hero to the crowd:
“He's never been so good at modern mathematics / But subtraction just comes really naturally
Because most of his life they've been taking things away from him / And saying they'll come back to us eventually
But now it feels like this town's near the end of the whole sordid affair /
And it's hard to explain, with no emoji indicating despair /
Just before half with like ten seconds left, the ref made a terrible call /
My man flew down the stairs and jumped over the rail /
Shook off the security and picked up the ball.”
I won’t spoil how it ends, but therein lies a glimpse of the storytelling and observation at work here. Is this guy related to the protagonist of Bruce’s “Glory Days?” Maybe it’s the same small town.
As good as the stories are, though, Finn’s spoken vocals get tiresome after a while and songs like “The Birdwatchers,” “City At Eleven” and “Understudies” just sort of meander around, musically speaking. There’s a woozy charm that permeates the album, like a bunch of friends sitting around telling stories in a dimly-lit room or bar, but it’s not enough to rescue a lot of the songs, and so getting through the album in one sitting is difficult. Maybe that’s by design; you don’t need to read 10 short stories at a time either, or else they blur together. But individually, they can be pretty darn good.