Franz Nicolay

Major General

[4/5]

It’s probably unfair to call the Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay anything other than a musician. How else to describe a man who has spent his life immersed in one scene or another, playing everything from anarcho-circus punk to Balkan-gypsy ditties and even chamber music and classic rock? None of this (or maybe all of it) really applies to Major General, a collection of songs that paint vivid pictures of events as thematically disparate as meeting the Jello Biafra-less Dead Kennedys or Nicolay’s sexual conquests as a road-weary rock star. Nicolay’s persona as storyteller is something between Peter Hammill with a Mohawk and ’70s-era Tom Waits. Like those master songsmiths, Nicolay serves it up hot, no matter what musical milieu is on the menu. (FISTOLO; fistolo.com) Oakland L. Childers