Lifter Puller disbanded in 2000. A constantly cycling line-up and grad-school pressures took their toll on the Midwest’s greatest art-punk, poetry-jamming spazz group. And not nearly enough people mourned the band’s demise.
But now lead singer and guitarist Craig Finn (who Lifter Puller drummer Dan Monick describes as “a sort of combo of Easy-E, the Boss and Bobby Knight”) has started up a new project, the Hold Steady. The group has just released its debut album The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, and although more rock-oriented than the stop-start fizz and pop sounds of Lifter Puller’s most ingenious moments, the Hold Steady combines slathering guitars and Finn’s frothing lyrical gymnastics into heart-wrenchingly majestic rock manifestos.
Finn doesn’t sing so much as let his acidic spoken word romps fall in between the cracks of the band’s tight, straight-forward rock instrumentals. Although the group is based in Brooklyn, their sound is pure Midwestern-fueled bravado. Finn rants about Michigan, Minneapolis and wars ripping apart Midwestern states and every song sounds like the wind hitting your eyes when you’re driving top-down across southern Illinois.
“Killer Parties,” the album’s closer, is the audio equivalent of the next-day mind-fuzz, cigarette smoke lingering in your mouth and trying to walk when your legs are still asleep. Finn drops some of the most sincere blabbering since Frank Black went by the moniker Black Francis. The melancholic track rejoices in the lost and lonely, bursting with hope and fear, and Finn sounds like some kid who just discovered drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and dancing all night. He sings, “Ybor city is tres speedy but they throw such killer parties / Killer parties almost killed me / If she says we partied then I’m pretty sure we partied / I really don’t remember / I remember we departed from our bodies.”
The opening track, “Positive Jam,” traces all of modern history, from the flappers in the ’20s to the tickertape ’40s to the ’70s, tangling up in gas lines until all time and history brought about a need within Craig Finn to begin a band. He sings/shouts, “I got bored when I didn’t have a band / So I started a band.” Finn opens the album with obliviously honest egotism, restating the Minutemen’s coy but inspiring statement (from their 1984 masterpiece Double Nickels on the Dime, the best 43-track, sea-salt-stained jazz-punk epic you’ll ever manage to find), “Our band could be your life,” paraphrased in a confident bar-band glaze.
But the Hold Steady is cooler than any bar-binging band you’ll find in the Central Standard time zone. Finn agrees with me, belting out on “Most People Are DJ’s,” “I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers / I drank until I dreamed / When I dreamed I always dreamed about the scene.” The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me is an album that punkers and mods and jammy-heads and rave playas and speed addicts and neo-hippies and messy-haired poseurs tipping their hair red and drunk kids and Dylan-dreamers and Chris Carrabba-wannabes can all bond over. It’s inciting and anti-nihilistic and dives head first and without regret into the swerving banality of consumer-bound American kids slamming their faces into rock for the first time. Everybody can play guitar, but this album is the tangible residue left over: the urgent need to self-express and the sweat and dead skin lingering on hundreds of fret boards. This is the guttural roar of rock recruitment.
And out on the West Coast, the Descendents are still kicking in heads with their unique brand of robot-love science. Their first new album in more than seven years, Cool To Be You, continues the pop-punk godfathers’ legacy of geeked-out, revved-up power chord proficiency. Lead singer Milo Aukerman seems determined to play out the South Bay punk scene, of which the Minutemen and Black Flag were part. And although lacking in the originality displayed by the Hold Steady’s debut, the Descendents prove their worth by keeping to the sound they’ve pioneered since 1978. Green Day and Good Charlotte and every other melodic punk outfit that has made a fortune off of power chords and lovable loser lyrics owe the Descendents more than just a little gratitude. And with tracks like “‘Merican” and “Nothing With You,” Milo and the boys keep their beloved SoCal sound alive.
