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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 18, 2022 13:42:56 GMT -5
I was wondering how high this was going to come in. You're right that it's an incredibly well-balanced mess, in the best sense --- that it never stops changing and still hangs together so tightly is amazing. And I do really like the "troubadours" verse, that's very good. But for me, TMS lacks the emotional breakout of all the best LP songs, almost like it's too tight to take off. Anyway, it came in at the top of my third bucket, and lowest of any F&F track except for LiaL, at #29. Different strokes! Haha, yes, different strokes for sure. The thing for me is that I think this actually have the emotional breakout, in the part starting with "We did the black and the tans..." - that part is to me where the song opens up, and where Craig sounds both desperate, self assured, but also fragile. There's a vibe to that ending who really hammers it home for me. The counterpart to this is Manpark or Nice Nice, both songs I really love, but who feels more cool, raw and tough than emotionally connecting. Also: I've touched upon this earlier, but some songs have - for some reason I can't explain - a certain visual representation in my head. Touch My Stuff is entering the place I work, the parliament in Norway, maybe that's because where I was when the genuis of the song really struck me. I think it must have been some time turing the summer 2018, but can't be sure. And it gives me a damn fine reason to post one of my personal favourites among Craig Finn quotes: www.clashmusic.com/features/good-trip-bad-trip-craig-finn-- I'm notoriously bad at quoting at this board, even after spending 13 years in here. But a few comments on the rest of you replies: Nassau Coliseum: Reading it back, I could have been a little too harsh in describing it, even if it cracked the top #10. I'm not really dismissing it as just a Big Song, I think it's more a case of convential beauty and classic good song writing isn't my main kick in Lifter Puller. They hit me the hardest when they're at their most singular Lifter Puller-y. But I also think I might put too much emphasis on the latter part of the song, cause the nervy, angly verses who makes up a large chunk of the songs first half, is very much Lifter Puller. Anyway: I adore the song, and I would be disappointed if they skipped it at a live show. Sherman City: Yes, "a labyrinth" is a really good way to put it. It's so hard to grasp, while also being pretty straight forward. And it has such a beautiful, creepy vibe. Viceburgh: Interesting that we both have this one so high. I sort of surprised myself putting it all the way up there, even though I've loved it for years. Now, we're entering the top #3!
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 18, 2022 13:43:57 GMT -5
#3: SPACE HUMPING $19.99
If there’s a potential indie rock hit somewhere in the Lifter Puller catalog, this surely must be it. I can’t really blame the public for failing in making it into one, but it has all the right ingredients: The in-your-face opening, the brash attitude, the memorable chorus (or at least, some sort of hook or, eh, catch phrase). It’s not exactly pop music, but it’s obviously a catchy song, and one that sets out to be just that.
But it wouldn’t rank so high on this list if that was all there was to the song. To me, this is a really clever, intelligent piece of music, using every gear of the band Lifter Puller had become at this point to create something strong, powerful and even playful. Musically, it’s quite simple, but so focused and effective, tight as hell. This is on display in a lot of the Fiestas And Fiascos songs, and I love how they use it to cram a handful of different parts into pretty short songs, chopping up themes and melodic figures, and throw them back together. But, man, how I love how they just let themselves lock into the groove on Space Humping, just letting that pulse pump all the way through.
That makes what Craig does on top of it so much more powerful too. I have to admit: The first time I heard this song, I heard the “Think about what you got…” in a totally different light - as somebody let down excusing himself, saying to the alpha male stealing his girl, “what can I do?”. A Jolene type of story, you know. But as soon as it dawned on me that it’s actually the alpha male delivering the lines, taunting the poor boyfriend, and stealing his girl just for fun, it made everything darker, yes, but also funnier. And naturally, it made me read a lot of the other lines in the song in a different light too.
As with so many other entries on this list, I keep on coming back to songs who have qualities the song in point doesn’t. And the same goes for this one: Yes, other songs have more nuance, more pure beauty, more mystique. But I get those kicks elsewhere. Space Humping $19.99 is perfect as a thumping, massive and very much complete track, who embodies Lifter Puller’s sheer power in the best way possible.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 19, 2022 14:17:10 GMT -5
#2: LET'S GET INCREDIBLE
Earlier on, I talked about how Star Wars Hips seems important, cause Craig once said it was the origin of the entire story. Let’s Get Incredible have always felt equally important, after Craig singled it out as the song he was most proud of in an interview back in the day. And it’s both easy to tell why he is proud of it, and to think of it as some sort of definitive Lifter Puller song. On the surface, it might be a mess of a rock song, like so many others, but there’s a grandeur here, a distinct feeling of something at stake, a slight notion of a manifesto in the making.
The opening riff plays a big part in this. Just as we discussed how Rock For Lite Brite or The Langelos have some sort of agency, or even meaning embedded in the musical progression, I think the cocky, flashy and self-assured riff of Incredible has it too. This is the sound of the band beefing it up, ready to settle the score, in a very confident way. The rolling drums adds the groove, set in a speed that invites everybody to get in on the ride. No need to rush it, when you’re at the top of your game. If Craig as a Hold Steady frontman comes off as a preacher in front of his congregation, this is the sound of a manic street preacher, holding communion for people with nowhere else to go.
Then, of course, Craig bursts in. And he does it with his fingers pointing in every direction, at every misfit who inhabits this insane scene he’s both describing and inhabiting himself. “This one goes out to…” every fucking freak in every fucking corner of this fucked up room, and Craig is standing in the middle of it, at the ground zero, just spitting his stamps of approval all over the place.
And as in almost every other Lifter Puller songs, there’s plenty of breaks and shifts, adding weight, turning things darker. The pauses just underlines how hectic the opus moderandi really is, and the kids are not on top of things anymore. They get rushed, crushed, sliced and swarmed, and their only saving grace is the speed holding them afloat. Then, the female voice enters the picture, to a stunning effect. Craig is so intense and in focus here, making it easy to forget he’s not the only one around. When “...and that’s when I said: Let’s get incredible” breaks in, with all it’s swirling echoes, it makes it all too clear that this isn’t a story told from the outside or in retrospect, but the words of someone being caught in it, right here, right now.
Ultimately, it ends on a down note, with another tale from a drug dealer, excusing himself. Entering the scene with one of the best standalone lines Craig ever wrote (“Dude looks like Jesus but sleeveless”), he serves as the condensation of everything this is about: The apparent saviour turning kids into slaves, the puppeteer in charge of everything, the DJ putting records on to keep the party going, way after it has turned both too druggy, too bloody, too ugly.
Let’s Get Incredible might be a little static, and it might never explode into what it suggest in it’s opening chords. It doesn’t really matter. To me it’s the metonymic representation of so much of what Lifter Puller is about, musically and storywise, and the ultimate culmination of everything suggested leading up to it. I will forever be thrilled and stunned by hearing the extremely well-written tounge-twisting over those riffs, and I feel pretty good putting it at #2.
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Post by thrasher9294 on Jan 19, 2022 19:05:49 GMT -5
I have a distinct memory of the first time I listened to Let's Get Incredible, sitting there with my iPod one morning. The moment I heard that synth intro, I knew it was going to be a momentous track in the catalog. Another one that definitely competes with TMS or Lonely in a Limousine for me with being as good a mission statement as any.
I promise I'll start writing up some more soon. I was hoping to get around to it a bit today but my life/schedule's been keeping me busy.
I will say, I've always been hesitant to put my opinions on Lifter Puller into words. There were so many conflicting thoughts in my head, preventing me from feeling like my opinions had any validity. I was just a kid when I first heard them, another fan who had learned about them from being a fan of The Hold Steady. The usual feelings of "Wow, lookit this guy—he likes the older band, great." I had several years between first hearing their work before I became damn-near obsessed with their music as a college student back in 2014. I was never as lyrically-minded a fan as most other THS fans I interacted with; there were several bands whose works I had fallen in love with by that time, for both lyrical storytelling and musical abilities, but the focus on lyrics was practically all I ever heard about in the circles that even knew about the Unified Scene to begin with.
I didn't want to seem like some hipster kid who liked a band nobody had ever heard of, but that wasn't how I genuinely felt. As we've all documented here, there's something that really fucking resonates in their music. Not just words, but the goddamned music too. Even in those first records.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 20, 2022 2:51:11 GMT -5
I will say, I've always been hesitant to put my opinions on Lifter Puller into words. There were so many conflicting thoughts in my head, preventing me from feeling like my opinions had any validity. I was just a kid when I first heard them, another fan who had learned about them from being a fan of The Hold Steady. The usual feelings of "Wow, lookit this guy—he likes the older band, great." I had several years between first hearing their work before I became damn-near obsessed with their music as a college student back in 2014. I was never as lyrically-minded a fan as most other THS fans I interacted with; there were several bands whose works I had fallen in love with by that time, for both lyrical storytelling and musical abilities, but the focus on lyrics was practically all I ever heard about in the circles that even knew about the Unified Scene to begin with. I didn't want to seem like some hipster kid who liked a band nobody had ever heard of, but that wasn't how I genuinely felt. As we've all documented here, there's something that really fucking resonates in their music. Not just words, but the goddamned music too. Even in those first records. This make a lot of sense, and I totally get what you mean. Being a music fan, especially in the late teens and early twenties, is such a god damn struggle, haha. There's hundreds of different opnions, spread out over several axis, each creating some (not very constructive, I would say) premises about how we talk about music. The entire trope about "the hipster liking the early stuff" is something we accept, cause it seemingly kicks upwards. It's the (relatively) casual fan's way to strike back against an imagined hierarchy. And, as every other structural pattern in any discourse, it's grounded in some sort of truth. But it's used in a way to pollute a pure and ideal conversation about music, and designed to make people careful about what opinions they articulate. I'm really glad I'm and adult now, and equally glad that we have this small community where we actually can share, discuss and talk about music we all love, in a pretty positive and constructive way. Also, on the music vs lyrics thing: I've always been a little bit of both, and discovering and getting to know a band, I'm bouncing in between them. I've always had an attention for lyrics, partly because any time I've been in a band, I have been a singer, but also cause of my general interest in text, litteratur, rhetoric and language. I'm not good at reading classics or poetry or anything like that, I just find text really interesting, and I tend to remember and memorize lyrics pretty fast. Then again, I'm mostly a music fan. I like a lot of music with terrible lyrics, it all depends on what kind of band using them, context and situation. But good lyrics tends to drag me into the music even more, like it's lighting up another part of my brain, making me paying even more attention to the music. And then they start to influence each oter mutually, bleed together in my mind, up till a point where it's hard to seperate what's what, in the sense of what I really like. And, yes, Lifter Puller's music definitely resonates. It's very, very far off from being backing music to Craig's vocals, even when a lot of their music put him in the spotlight by design. But I'm glad that he's there - I'm not sure I would ever spent enough time to really appreciate the music they way I do today, if Craig wasn't there to keep my attention through those first six months of listening to them. Lots of rambling here, but I'm so glad you've kept on reading all the way! It sure feels god to connect over a band like Lifter Puller.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 20, 2022 21:58:36 GMT -5
#3: SPACE HUMPING $19.99If there’s a potential indie rock hit somewhere in the Lifter Puller catalog, this surely must be it. ... But it wouldn’t rank so high on this list if that was all there was to the song. To me, this is a really clever, intelligent piece of music, using every gear of the band Lifter Puller had become at this point to create something strong, powerful and even playful. Musically, it’s quite simple, but so focused and effective, tight as hell. This is on display in a lot of the Fiestas And Fiascos songs, and I love how they use it to cram a handful of different parts into pretty short songs, chopping up themes and melodic figures, and throw them back together. But, man, how I love how they just let themselves lock into the groove on Space Humping, just letting that pulse pump all the way through. ... As with so many other entries on this list, I keep on coming back to songs who have qualities the song in point doesn’t. And the same goes for this one: Yes, other songs have more nuance, more pure beauty, more mystique. But I get those kicks elsewhere. Space Humping $19.99 is perfect as a thumping, massive and very much complete track, who embodies Lifter Puller’s sheer power in the best way possible. This is really interesting to me. I'm not sure if, by the first line, you mean that this is the song you'd put in front of someone you wanted to introduce to Lifter Puller; for me (as noted upthread) that song is probably The Flex And The Buff Result. But I can imagine SH1999 being that song. FWIW, not that anybody else will ever approach Lifter Puller this way, I think that this is the song whose sound most surprised me, after I'd read the written lyrics of most of the catalog. It's unique, and uniquely Lifter Puller, for sure. It's also (probably not coincidentally) the song in the catalog that I most associate with Steve, thanks to the keyboard hook in its own right, and also thanks to the backstory, which you can hear in Steve's interview with Simon Calder's Back To The City podcast starting here: youtu.be/nu-xP5_WPm0?t=3283"Dandy Dan Marino ain't no Dan DeVito." Awesome. (I should have linked to this in the football discussion in the Alright Alright thread, but like so many other things I didn't think of it until later. While indulging that thought, I'd also like to express my amazement that that video only has 223 views ... it is such a good interview, WTF. People don't know what they're missing.) It's not my favorite track by any means; in the end, I put it down at #19. But I agree that it's something special, and I totally understand why you have it at #3.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 20, 2022 22:20:49 GMT -5
#2: LET'S GET INCREDIBLEEarlier on, I talked about how Star Wars Hips seems important, cause Craig once said it was the origin of the entire story. Let’s Get Incredible have always felt equally important, after Craig singled it out as the song he was most proud of in an interview back in the day. And it’s both easy to tell why he is proud of it, and to think of it as some sort of definitive Lifter Puller song. On the surface, it might be a mess of a rock song, like so many others, but there’s a grandeur here, a distinct feeling of something at stake, a slight notion of a manifesto in the making. The opening riff plays a big part in this. Just as we discussed how Rock For Lite Brite or The Langelos have some sort of agency, or even meaning embedded in the musical progression, I think the cocky, flashy and self-assured riff of Incredible has it too. This is the sound of the band beefing it up, ready to settle the score, in a very confident way. The rolling drums adds the groove, set in a speed that invites everybody to get in on the ride. No need to rush it, when you’re at the top of your game. If Craig as a Hold Steady frontman comes off as a preacher in front of his congregation, this is the sound of a manic street preacher, holding communion for people with nowhere else to go. Too tired to look it up, but somewhere, Craig describes how LGI started as a joke about a song consisting entirely of shout-outs. What I can't shake about that framing is the idea you're sketching here, that underneath it all those shout-outs are 100% in earnest, that this is manic preacher Craig pared down to his emotional minimum, beyond characters, beyond stories, just preaching. I have a distinct memory of the first time I listened to Let's Get Incredible, sitting there with my iPod one morning. The moment I heard that synth intro, I knew it was going to be a momentous track in the catalog. I had that exact experience too. Then, of course, Craig bursts in. And he does it with his fingers pointing in every direction, at every misfit who inhabits this insane scene he’s both describing and inhabiting himself. “This one goes out to…” every fucking freak in every fucking corner of this fucked up room, and Craig is standing in the middle of it, at the ground zero, just spitting his stamps of approval all over the place. And as in almost every other Lifter Puller songs, there’s plenty of breaks and shifts, adding weight, turning things darker. The pauses just underlines how hectic the opus moderandi really is, and the kids are not on top of things anymore. They get rushed, crushed, sliced and swarmed, and their only saving grace is the speed holding them afloat. Then, the female voice enters the picture, to a stunning effect. Craig is so intense and in focus here, making it easy to forget he’s not the only one around. When “...and that’s when I said: Let’s get incredible” breaks in, with all it’s swirling echoes, it makes it all too clear that this isn’t a story told from the outside or in retrospect, but the words of someone being caught in it, right here, right now. The effect of the female voice on me is really strange. I can't exactly explain why, but it reminds me that I'm hearing something really old, in the way that biblical Genesis is really old. It's true that we get a late faint echo of this voice in Chillout Tent years later, but even that feels like it belongs to a franker, less guarded era of Craig's songwriting. Ultimately, it ends on a down note, with another tale from a drug dealer, excusing himself. Entering the scene with one of the best standalone lines Craig ever wrote (“Dude looks like Jesus but sleeveless”), he serves as the condensation of everything this is about: The apparent saviour turning kids into slaves, the puppeteer in charge of everything, the DJ putting records on to keep the party going, way after it has turned both too druggy, too bloody, too ugly. Let’s Get Incredible might be a little static, and it might never explode into what it suggest in it’s opening chords. It doesn’t really matter. To me it’s the metonymic representation of so much of what Lifter Puller is about, musically and storywise, and the ultimate culmination of everything suggested leading up to it. I will forever be thrilled and stunned by hearing the extremely well-written tounge-twisting over those riffs, and I feel pretty good putting it at #2. I have it at #9, but it's easily justified at #2; as you point out, Craig had at his own #1 (well, that, and one other song ...).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 20, 2022 22:31:18 GMT -5
I didn't want to seem like some hipster kid who liked a band nobody had ever heard of, but that wasn't how I genuinely felt. As we've all documented here, there's something that really fucking resonates in their music. Not just words, but the goddamned music too. Even in those first records. One of the advantages to being too old to be mistaken for a hipster kid is that I can write down the "that dude is crazy" charges up front and just call em like I see em. You are right on with this; for me, the best part of this thread is the serious discussion of the uniquely excellent musical (non-lyrical) qualities of these songs. It's been a real ear-opener.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 21, 2022 2:22:35 GMT -5
#1: 4 DIX
Still, after all I’ve written in praise for Let’s Get Incredible, the stunning ballads from outtakes and Half Dead And Dynamite or the mind blowing and hectic rush of Fiestas And Fiascos: I have to go with 4 Dix as #1. I’ve been changing back and forth between #1 and #2 since I made the ranking months back, and actually I made the final switch yesterday. I think a shared #1 would be a little lame, sometimes we just have to make a choice. And here it is, 4 Dix is my number one.
More than any other song on this list, I find it tough to express and articulate it’s perfection. When I think of it, I imagine an already pretty perfect rock song going through some sort of mechanical process, compressing it into an object small enough to fit in your hand, but heavier than you’ll be able to lift. It’s the feeling of every ingredient important in constructing the Lifter Puller catalog, being boiled down to a concentrated form, and then blended together in a seemingly impossible way.
It’s like this from the very start of the song. We’re thrown directly into it, in medias res, and it sounds like the band have been jamming for hours to hit this exact groove, only for the tape reel to be cut off to present us with the pinnacle of it. It’s so tight, almost mechanical, and the guitar entering is clinical and sharp. But the magic of 4 Dix is how quick it evolves, without losing any of it’s super tight fundament.
When Craig enters, he sounds jumpy and angsty, with a hoarse rasp to his voice, like this is a tale he has to tell, but not very willingly. The first couple of verses contain some of his most magnificent lines, in a pure poetic sense. I can’t fully decipher what they portray, but they sound so god damn amazing, with alliterations, metaphors and rhymes criss-crossing their way through each line. And behind him the band, build momentum, bar by bar.
What really hammers it home for me, is the combination of that eerie synth line who enters in the second verse, along with the spooky chanthing backing vocals way in the background. Even way before skepticatfirst did his mindblowing analysis of the lyrics, this felt like the entire Twin Cities ganging up on the characters, finally trapped in the corner. A showdown of dread and violence, referenced in the lyrics, but made so much more creepy from the grooving of the band, the chills from the synth and the sparse guitars.
It ends pretty abruptly. “What’s left?” does the female voice keep on asking. Not much, according to Craig. It’s over. What a fucking phenomenal way to end a career and a story as this. As I’ve said so many times before: There’s plenty of reasons to pick other songs for the #1 spot, but 4 Dix is really something special - in itself, as a symbol of what Lifter Puller were as a band and as a promise of what could have been if they had stayed together for a fourth album.
So, yeah, here we are, at the end of this countdown too. Some of these choices were a lot harder than what I imagined them to be, but I think the list roughly reflect how I feel about these songs. Let’s remember how blessed we are to have this catalog at our hands, and how it enables us to dig deep into Craig Finn’s history of putting words together in a way few others do, and into a band who surely deserves so much more attention and praise than it ever will recieve. And thanks to everybody hanging on all the way through the end. It’s been a blast!
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 21, 2022 2:41:12 GMT -5
EPILOGUE
Once again, doing a countdown like this, has been a blast. It has not really been about the ranking itself, but using the list to a) spark some debate about these songs, but also b) to make an incentive for myself to dig deeper into them. And that’s often a fruitful thing: To use a list, or some sort of other way to organize stuff, a vehicle to actually connect to music in a new way.
I wrote in the introduction that Lifter Puller never felt like my band. in the sense that I discovered them years after they broke up, and never were a part of any Twin Cities scene, let alone living in the USA at all, or being old enough for that to be an opportunity. Also, Lifter Puller wasn’t a huge band, who left lots of writing or reviews. And as Craig half-jokingly has pointed out, they were “the last band before the internet”. After finishing up everything, it sort of feels like a blessing: To be able to take in this entire catalog with not that many settled or predefined opinions about it. Most bands of a certain popularity have all these narratives tied to them. There’s a silent consensus about what each album represent, which songs that are most important, even the role each band member plays in the myth of the band. Lifter Puller are satisfyingly free of these narratives, and it have made it possible to approach this catalog in a more, eh, pure way.
That also made it harder, in some ways. Doing the Hold Steady ranking, it felt like a comfort blanket to know that everyone reading them had some sort of common feeling about these songs. I’m not saying I put Stuck Between Stations on the top of the list cause that’s what people expected, but just the fact that some sort of common meanings about the catalog existed, made it easier to make my reviews as part responses to those meanings. With Lifter Puller, I sort of had to do it all from scratch.
To many of us, Lifter Puller are first and foremost “Craig’s band before Hold Steady”. I discovered them with that perspective myself. But the past few years, and especially the Alright Alright thread and this ranking, have made them into a singular and separate entity for me. That feels strangely good. And it makes it easier to articulate what they were as a band too: A frantic and wildly adventurous rock band with lots of gritty edges, but with a very clear objective, some sort of ideology or musical guideline. Lifter Puller are so much VIBE, so much emotion. Sure, there’s riffs and narratives here, but after spending hundreds of hours with their material, I keep coming back to the way they make me feel. Angsty, jumpy, curious, scared, amazed, thrilled. Intelligent music which at its core tickles my stomach even more than my brain.
Again: Thank you for riding along through all of this. And for anyone approaching this thread in hindsight, feel free to drop your opinions on the list and the band in general. I have no illusions of Lifter Puller ever turning into a re-discovered legacy act. But I sure hope that a few curious souls find them down the line, and get the same experiences I’ve had with them.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 21, 2022 4:14:01 GMT -5
The TL:DR list
01. 4 Dix 02. Let's Get Incredible 03. Space Humping $19.99 04. Touch My Stuff 05. Viceburgh 06. To Live And Die In LBI 07. Sherman City 08. Nassau Coliseum 09. Candy's Room 10. The Flex And The Buff Result
11. Rock For Lite Brite 12. The Langelos 13. Star Wars Hips 14. La Quereria 15. Lie Down On Landsdowne 16. The Pirate And The Penpal 17. I Like The Lights 18. Sangre De Stephanie 19. Secret Santa Cruz 20. Lonely In A Limousine
21. Lifter Puller vs The End Of The Evening 22. Jeep Beep Suite 23. Nice Nice 24. Manpark 25. The Candy Machine And The Girlfriend 26. Mission Viejo 27. Math Is Money 28. Bloomington 29. Sublet 30. The Bears
31. The Mezzanine Gyp 32. Back In Blackbeard 33. Katarina And The K-Hole 34. Prescription Sunglasses 35. Double Straps 36. Hardwear 37. Mick's Tape 38. Cruised And Accused Of Cruising 39. Roaming The Foam 40. Slips Backwards
41. Bruce Bender 42. Half Dead And Dynamite 43. Lazy Eye 44. Kool NYC 45. Solid Gold Sole 46. 11th Avenue Freezeout 47. Plymouth Rock 48. Rental 49. The Gin And The Sour Defeat 50. Lake Street Is For Lovers
51. Mono 52. Emperor 53. Summer House
The enitre list is complied in this Spotify list:
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Post by sequesteredinuk on Jan 21, 2022 8:10:40 GMT -5
Let me be the first to say well done Muzzle.👏👏A Labour of love I'm sure but tremendous commitment and enthusiasm was obviously contained within. Any list like this will going disagreements over rankings, I would guess you'd expect that, I'm the same but I didn't put the work in so that's easy for me or anyone else to say.
I'm wondering now about generally how well known are Lifter Puller? Even amongst The Hold Steady fans? I would guess that most people on here would have some knowledge but I've met a few fans who've not investigated the first band of Craig and Tad much of sometimes not at all. It's an interesting one.
I look forward to you doing a Craig solo list one of these days Muzzle. I think (and I might be the only one) that some of Craig's most beautiful writing is contained in a lot of his solo output.
I hope you make it to London mate. I hope we all make it to London. Wear the yellow tee shirt so I recognise you. I'll buy you an overpriced beer for your efforts. 👍👍
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Post by thrasher9294 on Jan 24, 2022 21:32:02 GMT -5
Just wanted to drop in after reading the thread again this week and say how fantastic a finale this whole thing is. I've been working a 7-day work-week and will finally have a chance to write up some more of my thoughts when I'm off on Thurs/Friday, but until then I just wanted to say I love the positioning of 4Dix as a true endpiece of the band. I've really never thought about it with that sort of depth before, sadly—four dicks and the apocalypse.
To be honest, my experience before this recent thread was pretty rough at times. When I saw Craig in Cincinnati during his living room tour back in January 2016, I believe? I ended up speaking with some of the fans there afterwards and there weren't many others who were as familiar with it. Granted, again I would've probably been coming across as kind of a pretentious ass with how I was talking about them at the time, but when one of the fans asked about them, another interjected to say "Just listen to 'Let's Get Incredible' and that's all you need." Ah well. I do get it, again—I still remember seeing that LFTR PLLR hoodie/book available for sale back in '09 and just wrote it off back then too before I really got the chance to discover the band.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 26, 2022 6:55:33 GMT -5
I'm wondering now about generally how well known are Lifter Puller? Even amongst The Hold Steady fans? I would guess that most people on here would have some knowledge but I've met a few fans who've not investigated the first band of Craig and Tad much of sometimes not at all. It's an interesting one. Two people I knew were Lifter Puller fans, one and possibly the other one preferred them to The Hold Steady. Possibly due to hipster contrarianism in one case (though I think that’s exaggerated), possibly due to just preferring their musical style. I imagine they gained a few fans from John Darnielle’s mentions in his blog (which I used to read religiously) and his Pitchfork interview. And many of his fans tend to be the obsessive types who track down every reference and pull every thread. The amount of weird metal I tried to listen to because he told me to…. Plus they opened for Lizzo and Sleater-Kinney, and were heavily associated with the Dillinger 4, all of whom have different, semi-overlapping, devoted fanbases (the D4 ‘orgcore’ scene probably overlaps the most with the traditional Hold Steady fandom). On the old Celebration Rock podcast (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Tnmhl3SZEGHVhln2ytvNa?si=ii9RbQkXT1Ku3LcYbYXbFw), Craig tells the story of Billie Joe Armstrong dragging Joe Strummer to a Lifter Puller show, so that’s two famous fans… Despite all that, I only got into Lifter Puller last year, when I got much more serious about my Craig Finn fandom. I wish I’d ordered the book, or gone to the concerts. I think that they could be a more appealing band to many people than The Hold Steady. The post-punk (or ‘art punk’, a term I’ve only seen applied to them and the Talking Heads) style of Lifter Puller was both more in line with early-00s music trends and the current crop of UK bands (there’s a good overview of them/interview with Craig about them here: www.theringer.com/music/2021/10/13/22723195/talk-singing-dry-cleaning-rock-black-country-new-roads)Sorry, that was a long winded way of saying ‘They’re not as popular as the Hold Steady, but they could be, and they probably have a few fans who aren’t into THS’ musical style’
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Post by thrasher9294 on Jan 26, 2022 21:25:58 GMT -5
Wow. I cannot believe this quote: Blows my mind how much more overlap I find with this whole scene and their work. I've been listening very heavily to Reed's solo work for the past several years (I highly recommend checking out 'Songs For Drella,' the tribute to long-time Reed former friend Andy Warhol) and I would never have expected Craig to consider him an influence as well.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 27, 2022 1:11:37 GMT -5
Craig performed at a very small Lou Reed tribute with Patti Smith and a few other people, I believe he did ‘Vicious’. There’s not much footage online. Lou Reed’s most famous song has a sex worker named Holly and was inspired by a Nelson Algren book, so…
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 27, 2022 5:53:19 GMT -5
Wow. I cannot believe this quote: Blows my mind how much more overlap I find with this whole scene and their work. I've been listening very heavily to Reed's solo work for the past several years (I highly recommend checking out 'Songs For Drella,' the tribute to long-time Reed former friend Andy Warhol) and I would never have expected Craig to consider him an influence as well. Funny how these things work - my thoughts went to Lou Reed within the first 30 seconds I heard Craig sing for the first time. The temper in his voice, his phrasing, the way he half talks/half sings, they way he emphasize syllables, words, pauses. I love them both, and for many of the same reasons. I'm a bigger fan of Velvet Underground than Reed solo, but I appreciate a lot of what he did after the band split up to. Transformer is one of those rare albums who's both a verified and canonized classic, while still feeling fresh, funny and both poppy and arty at the same time. New York. Berlin is a hard listen, but so rewarding. And some of the stuff on New York is very similar to stuff both Craig solo and Hold Steady could have done at some point. Still, those VU albums hit even harder. There's few albums I've listened more too than Loaded, but it's hard to pick a favorite between that, the self titled and the debut.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 27, 2022 5:59:09 GMT -5
Let me be the first to say well done Muzzle.👏👏A Labour of love I'm sure but tremendous commitment and enthusiasm was obviously contained within. Any list like this will going disagreements over rankings, I would guess you'd expect that, I'm the same but I didn't put the work in so that's easy for me or anyone else to say. I'm wondering now about generally how well known are Lifter Puller? Even amongst The Hold Steady fans? I would guess that most people on here would have some knowledge but I've met a few fans who've not investigated the first band of Craig and Tad much of sometimes not at all. It's an interesting one. I look forward to you doing a Craig solo list one of these days Muzzle. I think (and I might be the only one) that some of Craig's most beautiful writing is contained in a lot of his solo output. I hope you make it to London mate. I hope we all make it to London. Wear the yellow tee shirt so I recognise you. I'll buy you an overpriced beer for your efforts. 👍👍 Thanks, man! Glad you followed it all the way through! I don't think there's a huge overlap between Lifter Puller and Hold Steady, at least outside of the most dedicated fans. I can understand why, though. A lot of the people who initially loved Lifter Puller, could easily have been put a little off by the very classic rock image Hold Steady took from the start. And many of those who fell in love with Boys And Girls or Stay Positive, might find Lifter Puller a little to angly, dis-harmonic, hasty. It's two very different bands, tied together by Craig's voice and stories. But I love them both a LOT. I've been thinking seriously about a list of Craig's solo material, and I've even made a rough draft of how it would look like. I then discovered that I haven't spent nearly enough time with I Need A New War to evaluate those songs, so maybe a few months down the line. And, yes, I still hope to get to London! I'll try to remember the yellow shirt, haha.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 30, 2022 19:59:47 GMT -5
Sorry to come back to this so late, this week has been non-stop. First order of business: #1: 4 DIXStill, after all I’ve written in praise for Let’s Get Incredible, the stunning ballads from outtakes and Half Dead And Dynamite or the mind blowing and hectic rush of Fiestas And Fiascos: I have to go with 4 Dix as #1. I’ve been changing back and forth between #1 and #2 since I made the ranking months back, and actually I made the final switch yesterday. I think a shared #1 would be a little lame, sometimes we just have to make a choice. And here it is, 4 Dix is my number one. Great choice. It's my #10, but the case for #1 is rock solid. More than any other song on this list, I find it tough to express and articulate it’s perfection. When I think of it, I imagine an already pretty perfect rock song going through some sort of mechanical process, compressing it into an object small enough to fit in your hand, but heavier than you’ll be able to lift. It’s the feeling of every ingredient important in constructing the Lifter Puller catalog, being boiled down to a concentrated form, and then blended together in a seemingly impossible way. I like this framing very much, both as an account of 4Dix specifically, and as a characterization of an overall quality that differentiates Lifter Puller from the Hold Steady. Not that every LP song is lapidary in the way 4Dix is, but that the greater collective economy --- sparer arrangements, no jamming, no choruses, less dilation --- is one of the things that makes Lifter Puller deeply gripping; it's gravitationally dense. It’s like this from the very start of the song. We’re thrown directly into it, in medias res, and it sounds like the band have been jamming for hours to hit this exact groove, only for the tape reel to be cut off to present us with the pinnacle of it. In fact, the first thing I always think of when it comes to 4Dix is the opening lines, with that insane pairing of music and lyrics on different offbeats; your characterization of that as a *musical* in medias res is totally eye-opening. This thread has taught me so much about LP musically ... It ends pretty abruptly. “What’s left?” does the female voice keep on asking. Not much, according to Craig. It’s over. What a fucking phenomenal way to end a career and a story as this. As I’ve said so many times before: There’s plenty of reasons to pick other songs for the #1 spot, but 4 Dix is really something special - in itself, as a symbol of what Lifter Puller were as a band and as a promise of what could have been if they had stayed together for a fourth album. This is a pretty compelling reason to have 4Dix at #1, in the face of all the doubts about how to order the top of the list: there should have been more, it's a pity there wasn't more. Sure, we did get more, in a way, and sure, they went out on top of their game. But man.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 30, 2022 20:33:31 GMT -5
I'm wondering now about generally how well known are Lifter Puller? Even amongst The Hold Steady fans? I would guess that most people on here would have some knowledge but I've met a few fans who've not investigated the first band of Craig and Tad much of sometimes not at all. It's an interesting one. Two people I knew were Lifter Puller fans, one and possibly the other one preferred them to The Hold Steady. Possibly due to hipster contrarianism in one case (though I think that’s exaggerated), possibly due to just preferring their musical style. I imagine they gained a few fans from John Darnielle’s mentions in his blog (which I used to read religiously) and his Pitchfork interview. And many of his fans tend to be the obsessive types who track down every reference and pull every thread. The amount of weird metal I tried to listen to because he told me to…. Plus they opened for Lizzo and Sleater-Kinney, and were heavily associated with the Dillinger 4, all of whom have different, semi-overlapping, devoted fanbases (the D4 ‘orgcore’ scene probably overlaps the most with the traditional Hold Steady fandom). On the old Celebration Rock podcast (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Tnmhl3SZEGHVhln2ytvNa?si=ii9RbQkXT1Ku3LcYbYXbFw), Craig tells the story of Billie Joe Armstrong dragging Joe Strummer to a Lifter Puller show, so that’s two famous fans… Despite all that, I only got into Lifter Puller last year, when I got much more serious about my Craig Finn fandom. I wish I’d ordered the book, or gone to the concerts. I think that they could be a more appealing band to many people than The Hold Steady. The post-punk (or ‘art punk’, a term I’ve only seen applied to them and the Talking Heads) style of Lifter Puller was both more in line with early-00s music trends and the current crop of UK bands (there’s a good overview of them/interview with Craig about them here: www.theringer.com/music/2021/10/13/22723195/talk-singing-dry-cleaning-rock-black-country-new-roads)Sorry, that was a long winded way of saying ‘They’re not as popular as the Hold Steady, but they could be, and they probably have a few fans who aren’t into THS’ musical style’ This is a great question-and-answer. I came to the Scene far too late to be able to comment with authority, but what @tlon says here --- both the short-winded and long-winded version --- seems pretty compelling to me. For me, the visceral Craig-narrative-centric attraction of both bands was so strong as to make everything else a secondary consideration, but I get that that's not going to be a primary selling point for most people. Having said that, what you say about "art punk" and "they could be" makes me think that they could actually be revival material, one of these days. And many of his fans tend to be the obsessive types who track down every reference and pull every thread. The amount of weird metal I tried to listen to because he told me to…. Pretty much. :-) There's a copy of Bad Brains' self-titled (not Rock For Light, but same difference) in the mail on its way to me right now, and that's because of Lifter Puller.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 30, 2022 21:12:21 GMT -5
I've been thinking seriously about a list of Craig's solo material, and I've even made a rough draft of how it would look like. I then discovered that I haven't spent nearly enough time with I Need A New War to evaluate those songs, so maybe a few months down the line. I should start by saying what I haven't said yet --- thanks for undertaking this thread all the way from beginning to end, it was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed it massively. I must admit I would be very curious to see what you'd do with Craig's solo material, but for very different reasons. The fascinating thing about the LP ranking is that the freshness and quality is so high across the entire catalog, it's easy to imagine the same songs ending up in the top ten or the bottom half; for me at least, there was a real tension right from the beginning in wanting to find out what would end up where. I'm probably the wrong person to make this call, but it seems to me that Craig's solo stuff is either way more subtle or way spottier. I can put together my top ten without having to look anything up, but I'm not sure I can get to twenty without having to work for it. And even my top ten is full of stories of appreciation discovered through effort: Preludes, which seemed long, loopy, and irresolute when I first heard it, only to become a favorite after close study of the lyrics brought me around, or Trapper Avenue, which when I heard it live with a full band and horns was suddenly transcendent. So rather than wanting to find out how you're going to be able to rule between SH1999 and Jeep Beep Suite, in most cases I'd just be curious to learn, what strikes you as special about the less spectacular bulk of the catalog?
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 7, 2022 6:14:35 GMT -5
I've been thinking seriously about a list of Craig's solo material, and I've even made a rough draft of how it would look like. I then discovered that I haven't spent nearly enough time with I Need A New War to evaluate those songs, so maybe a few months down the line. I should start by saying what I haven't said yet --- thanks for undertaking this thread all the way from beginning to end, it was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed it massively. I must admit I would be very curious to see what you'd do with Craig's solo material, but for very different reasons. The fascinating thing about the LP ranking is that the freshness and quality is so high across the entire catalog, it's easy to imagine the same songs ending up in the top ten or the bottom half; for me at least, there was a real tension right from the beginning in wanting to find out what would end up where. I'm probably the wrong person to make this call, but it seems to me that Craig's solo stuff is either way more subtle or way spottier. I can put together my top ten without having to look anything up, but I'm not sure I can get to twenty without having to work for it. And even my top ten is full of stories of appreciation discovered through effort: Preludes, which seemed long, loopy, and irresolute when I first heard it, only to become a favorite after close study of the lyrics brought me around, or Trapper Avenue, which when I heard it live with a full band and horns was suddenly transcendent. So rather than wanting to find out how you're going to be able to rule between SH1999 and Jeep Beep Suite, in most cases I'd just be curious to learn, what strikes you as special about the less spectacular bulk of the catalog? Thanks, man! You know how much fun this stuff is for me too, and being able to have deeply engaged debates about single songs from a band not THAT many outside this community cares about, is very rewarding. Yes, a lot of what you say about a potential ranking of the solo songs, is similar to what I think about it too. If I were to do it, it would be more of an examination of what tickles me and not, than a 100% thought through ranking from top to bottom. In general, I feel there's less at stake in Craig's solo songs. Sure, there's drama and tension and plenty of stuff hiding between the lines, both lyrically and musically, but the songs seems like they come from a place of secitity and maturity. This is not a qualitative judgement, it's just the general feeling of it - and a lot of the songs benefit from it, showcasing different feelings, or a different perspective or state of mind. Some of my favourites are songs that resemble what I find in Hold Steady, but I have other favourites where this scope opens up for a different way to appreciate Craig's storytelling. Let's see if a list materialize sometime in the future! For everybody jumping in at the very end of this thread, I strongly recommend giving Lifter Puller some spins - feel free to use this space to discuss whatever you'd like about Lifter Puller, their music, lyrics or anything else.
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Post by muzzleofbees on May 31, 2022 4:48:11 GMT -5
I'm wondering now about generally how well known are Lifter Puller? Even amongst The Hold Steady fans? I would guess that most people on here would have some knowledge but I've met a few fans who've not investigated the first band of Craig and Tad much of sometimes not at all. It's an interesting one. Two people I knew were Lifter Puller fans, one and possibly the other one preferred them to The Hold Steady. Possibly due to hipster contrarianism in one case (though I think that’s exaggerated), possibly due to just preferring their musical style. I imagine they gained a few fans from John Darnielle’s mentions in his blog (which I used to read religiously) and his Pitchfork interview. And many of his fans tend to be the obsessive types who track down every reference and pull every thread. The amount of weird metal I tried to listen to because he told me to…. Plus they opened for Lizzo and Sleater-Kinney, and were heavily associated with the Dillinger 4, all of whom have different, semi-overlapping, devoted fanbases (the D4 ‘orgcore’ scene probably overlaps the most with the traditional Hold Steady fandom). On the old Celebration Rock podcast (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Tnmhl3SZEGHVhln2ytvNa?si=ii9RbQkXT1Ku3LcYbYXbFw), Craig tells the story of Billie Joe Armstrong dragging Joe Strummer to a Lifter Puller show, so that’s two famous fans… Despite all that, I only got into Lifter Puller last year, when I got much more serious about my Craig Finn fandom. I wish I’d ordered the book, or gone to the concerts. I think that they could be a more appealing band to many people than The Hold Steady. The post-punk (or ‘art punk’, a term I’ve only seen applied to them and the Talking Heads) style of Lifter Puller was both more in line with early-00s music trends and the current crop of UK bands (there’s a good overview of them/interview with Craig about them here: www.theringer.com/music/2021/10/13/22723195/talk-singing-dry-cleaning-rock-black-country-new-roads)Sorry, that was a long winded way of saying ‘They’re not as popular as the Hold Steady, but they could be, and they probably have a few fans who aren’t into THS’ musical style’ I was meaning to come back to this last year, but totally forgot about it. I think you're onto something: Lifter Puller were actually more in style with some of the stuff happening in the early 00s than anything else. And I wrote a little bit about it upthread: #27: MATH IS MONEYLet’s take some time to consider this hypothetical scenario: Instead of calling it quits in 2000, the entire band move to New York to take an earnest shot at the bigtime. With them, they bring the first songs of what could have turned out to be Lifter Puller’s fourth album: Secret Santa Cruz, 4 Dix, Back In Blackbeard, La Quereria - and Math Is Money. It’s a batch of songs surprisingly in touch with what was happening in the US (but also in the UK) at the time: Fuzzy garage guitars over a steady and dry backbone who had some resemblance to early 80s postpunk and new wave, with a talky singer on the top of it. In New York, bands like Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but also Liars, TV On The Radio and others, were starting up and refining their sound. They all had different takes on this “sound”, but were pretty much associated by bringing rock’n’roll (in some way or the other) back into the city- and soundscapes. Lifter Puller could easily have fitted in here. Slightly more punky and alternative than some of the household names, with Craig Finn as the enigmatic frontman, and with their heavy Twin Cities focus as a nice niche thing to their name. They could have opened for The Strokes, and being labeled as the wild seniors to match Strokes’ youthfulness. They could have opened for Interpol and being labeled as the band who in a dressed-down way sped up the sweeping postpunk of Interpol, and added energy and rawness to the scene. In 2002 they could have released their breakthrough album, critically acclaimed and respected, doing the European festival circuit. Instead, they broke up, Craig and Tad headed to New York, and when Hold Steady saw the light of day in 2003-04, it was as an antithesis to the very movement Lifter Puller could have been a part of. “Anti trucker-hat music”, as Pitchfork once labeled them. “The 80s almost killed me/ let’s not recall them quite so fondly”, as Craig himself sneered towards the current flavour of the week back then. I get that this counterfactual historical exercise is pretty flawed, but it’s by no means unthinkable. And it’s really interesting to hear late Lifter Puller in this perspective. To me, they’ve always sounded unique, and a little bit outside of space and time. But there’s plenty of bands emerging in the early 00s who have lots of similarities to the core identity of Lifter Puller too. And especially in these latest songs, the batch of songs who sounds finished, ready for release, but instead of being a part of a LP4, ended up as singles spread out on various compilations and seven inches.
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Post by sequesteredinuk on Jul 20, 2022 10:32:49 GMT -5
I'm moving house this week so I'm lugging boxes around and as I'm moving a CD rack one falls on the floor. It's Fiestas and Fiascos!!!.This has to be a sign right??
So I take a break from the oppressive heat of England in summertime (there's a sentence I've never said once before) make a cup of tea and listen again, first time in a while.
As I'm sitting there on a box I start thinking am I the only one who thinks this is fucking fantastic?.Then I remember this thread and it soothes my mind that I'm not alone.
So thanks Muzzle and all contributors. Thanks for your indulgence for reading my seemingly pointless point of view also, wherever geography places you all. 🙏👍
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jul 20, 2022 13:44:29 GMT -5
Fiestas & Fiascos is one of my all time favourite albums. Rock on!
...and the countdown WILL continue - I've just been a little busy with first work, then a family holiday. August is always a nice month for threads like this.
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