Lifter Puller

5 Stars for the Band... 3 for the Album

     

This has always been the one Lifter Puller album that has... bugged me. There's no question that Craig Finn's songwriting is in full force by this point, and the opening run of Double Straps, Bloomington, and Star Wars Hips (which Craig eventually tied back into the Lifter Puller saga with their last song, The Flex and the Buff Result) is actually very enjoyable. This album also is the lone Lifter Puller album that perfectly exemplifies the ardent nostalgia that has always been a staple of the band's sound (the closing track, Mono, has an eirie relation the the closing track on Craig's later band's (The Hold Steady) ending track on their first ablum, Killer Parties).
That being said, there are parts of this album that are half-baked at best, and flat out filler at worst. The opening three tracks rip; and Solid Gold Sole, Sublet, and the nostalgia-ridden Mission Viejo manage to keep things interesting to a point. But the rest of the songs are some of the most dispensible that Lifter Puller has ever written. The mumbling Lazy Eye lacks the intensity of Nassau Coliseum and the retrospective nature of Viceburgh. The Mezzanine Gyp sounds like 2 and a half minutes of radio static, and Rental draws on MUCH longer than it should. I personally like the more relaxed nature of Summer House, but it still lacks any sort of flare. And Mono just serves it's purpose of ending the album without having any sort of weight attached to the song itself.
Additionally, I have problems with the sound of the album overall. Although Lifter Puller always had problems with writing melodies that didn't sound repetative (they loved to hang around the mediant, supertonic, and tonic notes of any key that they were in, which gave all of their melodies a very similar nature), this album itself seems to have one melody repeated over and over again. Additionally, there is an utter lack of any ascending and descending synthesizer that gave Craig Finn the perfect place to lay out his witty, clever, and sometimes terrifying drug-ridden party schpeels. With 2 guitars pounding out a grand total of 4 chords in this album, Lifter Puller falls into the funk that many alternative bands fall into of being completely uninspiring. Fortuanetly for any fan of Lifter Puller, this was the beginning and not the end of their sound.
This album should only be picked up after one has thoroughly digested the other Lifter Puller albums. Once a person has a rather thorough understanding of the Lifter Puller universe, this album becomes a great momento of their roots. But until that point, it remains a rather uninspired and boring ablum.