| When it’s your favorite band you’re talking about, no single example can possibly suffice, but take a moment to consider this first album’s penultimate song, “Mission Viejo,” as an example of the rarefied air that Lifter Puller is teaching itself to breathe. On this album, vocalist and lyricist Craig Finn hadn’t yet been completely possessed by the characters whose tics and shudders would come to define Lifter Puller for the rest of their career, but you can hear him gearing up for the full-blown visitation of the muse. You can hear the band getting ready for their grand arrival, too, as their ability to lock into a single desperate groove is slowly gelling into something greater than the result of lots of practice and plenty of touring. In “Mission Viejo,” as perfectly-placed a next-to-last song as you’re likely to ever find, they achieve some of the same sort of instinctive understanding of each other’s musical moves that made Pavement at their best such a decadent pleasure. “Mission Viejo” is the sound of a young band accurately locating the one thing they do best: in Lifter Puller’s case, that one thing involves melding highly stylized lyrics with unambiguously dark rock music that sounds like Thin Lizzy on dirty peanut butter crank or Bad Company after a six-year drunk spent chartering gun-boats off Kuala Lumpur. The lyrics, meanwhile, are almost unparseably wonderful. Trying to quote them to explain what makes them great is a pointless effort, as only in their context can one really hear their triumphant fusion of the intensely private and the elaborately formal, their theatrically persuasive way of selling you a bill of goods. |