Review Summary: Here's to our mundane hope
Something that’s always made Craig Finn stand apart from his peers, both in his solo career and his work with The Hold Steady, is his third-person approach to storytelling. Instead of spilling his own guts onto a record, he opts to let his
characters do the spilling for him as he fashions a compelling narrative around them. The themes are certainly still grounded and relatable - drugs, religion, violence, you name it - but they unfold in a more cinematic and panoramic way than most other indie rockers would be pressed to attempt. Because of this (as well as Finn’s literary background), his records feel more like auditory vignettes or miniature audiobooks than straightforward songs; this is only compounded by his vocal style, which blurs the line between singing and spoken word. With all of that said,
A Legacy of Rentals serves as something of a reset for Finn, being the first record following a self-proclaimed trilogy of albums that represented - in his own words - “unremarkable people”. According to the man himself (taken from Bandcamp):
”These songs deal a lot with memory: how we remember people that are gone, places that have changed, major events that are part of our past. It's about how memories become the stories that we tell others and ourselves. It’s about the distortion that happens to our own histories when stretched by time and distance. It’s about finding joy in the mundane and engaging in hope in our everyday.”
On the surface, this definitely reads as a tonal departure from Finn’s previous records. Much of his discography - especially in later years - has been built on dark topics that portray the more flawed human side of his often hedonistic and indulgent characters. But the “hope in our everyday” is what I want to focus on, as it provides an interesting take on Finn’s existing body of work. As I’ve stated earlier, he’s always had a penchant for focusing on the lives and endeavors of ordinary people; however, there’s a bit more buoyancy and pep to be found on
A Legacy of Rentals, even in many of its darkest moments. And let’s be clear: there are dark moments. Finn didn’t suddenly pull a 180°, instead meaningfully expanding on his signature sound with some new tricks. Opener “Messing with the Settings” is classic Craig Finn, a narratively dense and long-winded slow-burner with plenty of loaded imagery; the song’s hook - “Sundown, it feels like I’m riding a train I’m not on” - is repeated like a mantra, as the verses describe a practical young woman with a “dwindling grace and faith in the industry”. The level of lyrical detail is exquisite, and the music is simple but effective.
However, as is typical of a Finn album, the words can get a bit obtuse from time to time. But this only adds to the allure of the record, especially in the songs that juxtapose such cryptic imagery with sunny melodies and upbeat instrumentals. “The Amarillo Kid”, for instance, paints a Steely Dan-esque picture of drug dealers and general corruption; however, because of the hopeful, sentimental chord progression, you’d never guess this was the case unless you gave the lyrics a more dedicated listen. Similarly, “Due to Depart” sets imagery of car crashes and overall mortality to a lovely heartland rock sound reminiscent of The Gaslight Anthem. Once in a while, the music does match the lyrics more closely, such as on the reflective keyboard passages of “Curtis & Shepard” or the slow, hypnotic drone of “The Year We Fell Behind”. However, the more upbeat moments of the record are definitely what make it stand out. They serve to make
A Legacy of Rentals an album built on compelling contradictions, something that Finn himself seems to confirm at the very end of closer “This is What It Looks Like”:
”With our eyes back in our sockets
And a mess of broken bottles
That’s just what it looks like when we’re joyful”
A Legacy of Rentals is another feather in Finn’s already-impressive cap, and may just end up going down as one of his best records to date. The glints of hope it offers are often delivered with a begrudging sigh, as if he knows he can’t spoonfeed the emotion to his audience: after all, for every moment of joy, there’s always a moment of sorrow or tragedy that lurks just around the corner. Finn seems acutely aware of this, and knows not to let the happiness linger; sometimes you have to savor those little glimmers while you still can.
