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Puller is one of those bands that I always wanted to get into, but never got around to it. I liked the two or three songs I heard on various samplers, and I even have a For Love Not Lisa album (The Lost Elephant), but I’ve never gotten around to buying a Puller record. What this means is that I can ’t compare What’s Mine at Twilight to previous Puller albums-­it exists purely on its own merit for me.

So is it a good album? I’m not sure. When I initially received my promo copy back in October 2000, I loved it. I live in the mountains of northeast Georgia, and the music fit perfectly with the change in season. But here it is, February 2001, and I’m less infatuated. What’s Mine at Twilight certainly has its share of good songs-­"Hold On To Me" and "She’s the One" are as good as any to come out of Tooth & Nail-­but the lyrics, while certainly sung with sincerity, can be a little incomprehensible at times ("She loves like she leaves / She leaves like she loves"), and Mike Lewis’ voice can get a little old after awhile. I like this better than The Lost Elephant, but not as much as I thought I would.

Michial Farmer (2/2/2001)

Modern rock artists Puller began their musical tenure during the early '90s in For Love Not Lisa, a band that started as a  collaboration between vocalist Mike Lewis and guitarist Miles.  After recruiting bassist Clint McBay and drummer Aaron Preston for a self-titled EP in 1992, the band landed a contract with Elektra Records.  FLNL released their full-length debut, 1993's Merge, and toured with artists ranging from Green Day and Stone Temple Pilots to the Tubes.  In 1994, the band gained its most extensive exposure when "Slip Slide Melting" from Merge was included on the Crow soundtrack album, which went double platinum by the spring of 1995. Buoyed by the success of the soundtrack, the band released its second album, Information Superdriveway, in the fall of that year.  But, after a relatively poor showing for Superdriveway, the group quietly disbanded.  In 1996, Lewis contacted former FLNL roadie Geoff Riley and the two were eventually signed to Tooth & Nail records with only a handful of completed songs and no definite band lineup.  Over the next five years, Lewis, Riley and an ever-shifting array of musicians, split an EP with labelmates Roadside Monument in 1997, recorded two studio albums, 1996's Sugarless and 1998's Closer than You Think, and released Live at Tom Fest in 1999.

The latest effort, What's Mine at Twilight, finds the band, now reduced to a duo of Riley and Lewis, moving away from the punk/metal fusion of its earliest efforts towards a more subdued modern rock sound.  The opener, "Hold on to Me," is a catchy post-grunge number that leaps out of the starting gate with soaring vocals, tight harmonies and a sludgy wall of guitar that combine to accentuate the song's nimble transition between its quiet intro and bombastic verses and chorus. Things run mostly downhill, though, from that point on. "Man on the Move," features most of the elements that made "Hold On" so appealing, but underneath the multiple layers of muddy guitarwork, the song's awkwardly coupled vocal and instrumental sections offer little discernible melody.  Likewise, songs like "Heat of the Moment" and "Two Can Play that Game" are mostly aimless melanges of power chords thrown together in seemingly random fashion.  The band's lighter, pop-oriented material meets with comparable results.  "Give Me a Ride" wears a peppier rhythm and leaner guitar sound than its grungy cousins, but is nonetheless brought to a halt by its overly repetitious construction.  And while the slightly off-key attack of "Hold On" and "Two Can Play" is well-suited for such harder-edged songs, it winds up being distinctly at odds with "These Days" and the album's other more pop-minded compositions.

Lyrically speaking, Twilight fares only slightly better. "These Days" (I want to live like Paul/ But I think like Thomas/ And I'm more like Judas these days) makes fine use of syntactic parallelism, while "Give Me A Ride" steers well clear of what would otherwise be an exercise in cliche' by arguing its familiar themes obliquely instead of overtly.  And songs like "If She's the One" and "First to Have" (When the sun goes down on an answer/And God's great hope spills over/ I tend to hurt myself without knowing) are at once perceptive and unique.  But the album contains a nearly equal amount of filler. "Man on the Move" and "She's the Girl" (She'll let me down for a while/ She's on her way/ And I'll stay here broken down for miles) awkwardly straddle the line between outright declaration and indirect allusion, while succeeding at neither.  And entries like "Two Can Play that Game" (All you want and more/ If you can come and get it/ Fake tears won't get it), "Good Song" (Come on, turn around/ Give this boy a chance) and others lack the proficiency exhibited by so many of the group's contemporaries.  Sadly enough, despite having produced a sizable body of noteworthy metal-tinged punk rock during the early 1990s and an equal amount of catchy, well-written modern rock over the past few years, What's Mine at Midnight stands in lamentably poor contrast to the group's superior earlier projects.

Bert Gangl 2/17/2001