Craig Finn's latest solo LP is too similar to The Hold Steady to make any sense

Unfortunately, like any band who exists long enough, The Hold Steady...well, they didn't piss it all away exactly. They just released an album you had to apologise for, followed by an album that was touted as a - gulp - 'return to form'. Never a good sign.

Their 2013 LP Teeth Dreams was hailed as such a 'return' because the band stopped dilly-dallying with acoustic guitars and weird instruments and started rocking again. Yet it still sounded, if not half-hearted, then certainly a little unconvincing; its best moment was, in fact, its quietest. "Almost Everything", tucked away as the penultimate track, redefined what a classic Hold Steady song could be; the lyrics were at once irreverent and deep, summing up the band's ethos perfectly ("Sat in the back of the theater just drinking and talking / About movies and Krishna and hardcore and Jesus and joy"), but without any of the increasingly tiresome Big Rock Posturing. It's this campfire strummer that forms the foundations of Craig Finn's second solo album, Faith in the Future.

The drawback with a record by a frontman with such a distinctive voice is that its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness - it sounds like an acoustic Hold Steady album. There are some neat touches, particularly the unexpected jazzy interludes and Mardi Gras brass on "Roman Guitars", but otherwise it's business as usual. Lead single "Maggie I've Been Searching for Our Son" is only a couple of years and a kick-ass solo away from having been the second best track on Teeth Dreams.

Finn's lyrical preoccupations - misplaced faith in "saviours", the lowlives of smalltown USA, and the exploits of countless characters - also remain in tact, almost to a fault. In fact, the character sketches - blunty laid out in songs with titles like "Sandra from Scranton" and "Going to a Show" - are the least satisfying elements of the record. Finn always works best when he casts a wider narrative eye, which is why "Newmeyer's Roof" is one of the record's more bracing moments. Touted as Finn's 9/11 song, the collapse of the World Trade Centre is merely a pinprick of detail within a much larger impressionist lyric - or, as the singer would have it, "All these tall tales, and one tiny truth - saw the towers go down from up on Newmeyer's roof / Yeah, we were frightened, yeah we were drinking / It was all so confusing."

The annoying thing is that Faith in the Future isn't a bad album by any means; it simply isn't different enough to really make sense as a solo effort. Rather, it just sounds like Finn treading water until his band come back for album number seven. Then again, having risen to indie rock stardom (whatever that is) at a relatively advanced age, maybe this is the moment where Craig Finn proves that he has nowhere left to go. I genuinely hope that's not the case. After all, you've gotta stay positive.