Cheap Fiestas + Fiascos (Music) (Lifter Puller) Price

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Customer Reviews of Fiestas + Fiascos

Please Don't Pay $100 For This
This is a good record. If you're coming to this via the Hold Steady like me, you won't be disappointed. Just take the big arena sound of that band and replace it with some punk/new wave backing music and there you are. I actually prefer this to Almost Killed Me, but not to Separation Sunday, which is a masterpiece. Just DO NOT pay $100 for this. I bought it on iTunes for $10. In general, watch out for the price gougers selling used copies of out-of-print CDs. Itunes might surprise you with some of the out-of-print stuff it sells and, of course there are other slightly less reputable online vendors selling deeply discounted mp3s that you can always check before letting some dude rob you of a day's pay.

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One of my "desert island discs"
Their final album, 1999's "Fiestas + Fiascos", finds the Minneapolis proto-art-punk band Lifter Puller at the top of their game. (Also check out "Soft Rock", a must-have collection of all of the band's albums, EPs, and singles, with the exception of "Fiestas + Fiascos". They are essential companion pieces, as you'll find out in a minute.) Songwriter Craig Finn's voice will surely appeal to no more than 1% of the general public, and the band's main fans are typically card-carrying members of the very small, very nebulous "indie rock" scene. To me, it's the songs that carry the music - and Finn's surgical-strike wordplay, hip-hop-influenced rhyme style, and half-step-behind vocal delivery lifts a large portion of that weight (pardon the pun.) What Dylan did with "Tangled Up In Blue" - re-casting each verse's lyrics from different perspectives every time he sang the song - Finn manages to stretch across several albums and singles. A significant number of Lifter Puller tunes revolve around a private detective story, in which Finn casts himself as the PI who's been double-crossing, double-crossed, and witness to a series of events that seemingly climaxes with the last tune on "Fiestas + Fiascos". (Perhaps this makes them the world's first "concept" band? If not the first, then certainly the best!) So, you'll hear about shady characters like "Juanita" and the "Eyepatch Guy", and places like "15th and Franklin" (yep, the intersection in South Minneapolis) in several songs at various times and situations. There's always enough to leave you guessing. In fact, the "mystery" was never really resolved, and may never be. Finn moved to New York after Lifter Puller disbanded in 2000, and has started a group called The Hold Steady. The characters from the Lifter Puller albums are not likely, he says, to re-appear in the new band's lyrics. The standout on "Fiestas + Fiascos" is the very last tune, "The Flex and the Buff Result", in which one of the main characters in the "mystery" is about to buy a nice pair of cement shoes... but the story is far from over.

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Yes Yes Y'all!
This just in: everyones' on-target reviews of this excellent CD still apply three years later! Get it while it's still gettable! (hey, 'microwaveable' is a word, isn't it?)