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"Clear Heart Full Eyes" is the debut solo studio album by The Hold Steady vocalist and guitarist Craig Finn, released on January 24, 2012 on Full Time Hobby. Produced by Mike McCarthy, the album was recorded during a five-month break from The Hold Steady, with Finn noting, "I wanted to do something with a little more storytelling and a lot less volume." Upon release, the album debuted at #89 in the US. Rolling Stone named the song "Rented Room" the 40th best song of 2012.
At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 69% based on 34 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
User Album Review
Like some of the best Hold Steady albums, these songs are all interconnected, full of recurring characters and settings, so that even when the tempos lag and the guitars noodle, Clear Heart is pulled along by pure narrative momentum, giving it an immersive power that it doesn't necessarily earn. But that's Finn's main appeal: He's a born storyteller who's chosen rock as his medium. On Clear Heart he creates a new world with unique characters and rules, which are concrete, specific, and evocative. While it pales alongside some of the Hold Steady's best albums, these songs are so entangled with those people and places-- with those Holly and Charlemagne mythologies-- that they never grow tedious or ignorable. So perhaps Finn is turning into someone like Mercury or Rotten, acting as adviser to a new generation of listeners. Like them, he came on like a man on a mission, but now that it's been accomplished, he sounds like a man trying to figure out what comes next. Clear Heart is just good enough to keep us listening.
Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner for pitchfork.com.
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