Lifter Puller
Until recently you could count the number of indie-rock tunes about club culture on one hand. But Lifter Puller, an indie-rock band from Minneapolis whose rough-and-ready guitar riffs, hardy snarl, and blocky rhythms make them close kin to Archers of Loaf, have written a dozen of them–a concept album, no less. Their new Fiestas + Fiascos makes wicked fun of rockers, hip-hoppers, and especially ravers as it hurtles through a string of songs that describe the most debauched evening this side of a Fourth of July party at the Kennedy compound.
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The cast of characters includes a guy wearing an eye patch with “needle-marked arms like the front man in some grunge band,” a “dancer who overdid it with the liquid tan,” a girl named Juanita who explains, “You can call me LL Cool J / ‘Cause I’ve been here for years and you can’t call it a comeback / If you’ve never even been away,” and a young couple lost in a narcotic haze: “Our teachers they call her Katrina, but really / When you’re racing toward sunrise / Katrina’s a bit much to say / Now we just call her K / And her boyfriend is the Bass…He’s the boy with the pipe in his face.” And then there’s Nightclub Dwight, the creepy lurker who runs the Nice Nice, the spot where said company congregates: “One night Dwight got all goofy on the roofies / Now they all call him the fiddler on the roof.”
Lifter Puller opens for Les Savy Fav and Love as Laughter at the Empty Bottle this Thursday, April 6.
