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Lifter Puller
SOFT ROCK
(SELF-STARTER FOUNDATION)

Stars graphics

Save for one early seven-inch and their full-length swan song, Fiestas + Fiascos, this two-disc set represents the recorded legacy of Minneapolis’s Lifter Puller, who called it quits in 2001. Home-town heroes who never received their national due, the band look likely to be better appreciated after their official demise.

They deserve it: frontman Craig Finn is a feverish amalgam of early Elvis Costello, Schoolly D, and Mark E. Smith, his often brilliant lyrics combining a killer MC’s syllabic density ("Pestilence gave us a bitchin’ pen-and-pencil set/It was excellent") with an urban hardcore kid’s disaffection ("Twin Cities, they’re double-teaming me"). While Finn tracks his recurring characters’ substance-numbed, party-hopping lives, the disorienting music tops solid Midwestern math rock with arena-scaled keyboard gestures and hip-hop production touches. (The album title, if you hadn’t guessed, is false advertising.) Disc #1 is unstoppable, but standouts include "4 Dix," in which the Horsemen of the Apocalypse do lines in a dance-club bathroom, and "The Pirate and the Penpal," a wrenching jailhouse-correspondence saga. The numbers on their thinly recorded 1996 debut, which ends disc #2, aren’t as consistent as their later work, but the best ("Rental") more than hint at future glories. Forty songs worth of bad drugs and worse sex are a lot to wade through, but this is, or was, one band worth being a completist about.

BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

Issue Date: January 23 - 30, 2003
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