Craig Finn Resets Expectations With Solo Debut, ‘Clear Heart Full Eyes’

Hold Steady singer Craig Finn steps away from the band on his first solo album. (Photo by Jeremy Balderson)

Apart from Craig Finn’s contributions to a short-lived techno project called the Brokerdealer, he and Tad Kubler have always been a musical team. First in Lifter Puller and later in the Hold Steady, Finn’s high-verbal ranting and Kubler’s barroom guitar riffs and blowzy solos had come to seem inseparable — and rock ‘n’ roll was the better for it on a series of increasingly excellent albums by the Hold Steady.

The group’s 2010 release, “Heaven is Whenever,” wasn’t as excellent, though. In fact, in hindsight, it seems a little stale, as if the band started thinking more about expectations than the music. And what better way to reset expectations than with a side project? That’s not expressly why Finn recorded “Clear Heart Full Eyes” (Vagrant), his new solo debut, but it’s the net result of these 11 new songs.

Although Finn digs even deeper into some of the spiritual themes he’s explored before, “Clear Heart Full Eyes” is bleaker than the Hold Steady’s albums. The marginal characters populating these songs seem less predisposed toward redemption; they’re somehow more defeated and their frailties feel harder and less escapable. These songs are less about characters who take refuge in the community of the scene — a central tenet of Hold Steady mythology — than retreat inside themselves. “The best advice that I’ve ever gotten/Was from good old Johnny Rotten,” Finn sings on “No Future.” “He said, ‘God save the Queen,’/He said, ‘No future for you, no future for me.’”

The music matches Finn’s somber mood. Recorded with producer Mike McCarthy and a four-piece backing band last summer in Austin, Texas, the songs are fairly subdued country-rockers. Moaning steel guitar lends a rootsy cast to “Western Pier” and shores up the moody opener, “Apollo Bay,” while fast, twangy electric leads zip around deceptively jaunty acoustic guitar on “Friend Named Jesus.” Finn sings in gently weary tones on “Jackson,” and wistfully recounts memories over prickly cascades of electric guitar on “Rented Room,” his narrator stuck in a psychic limbo state that is at once comfortable and not, in equal measures.

It’s often a dark album, but “Clear Heart Full Eyes” is also absorbing, largely because it finds Finn doing what he does best: telling vivid stories. And even if it’s disorienting at first to hear his voice without Kubler’s guitar, Finn’s first solo outing shows that whatever the musical medium, his message still resonates.