Beyond The Guess Who: Limblifter- "Screwed It Up"

Welcome to Beyond The Guess Who. Each week I cover a lesser known Canadian artist. This week: Limblifter.

Welcome to Beyond The Guess Who. Each week I cover a lesser-known Canadian artist. This week: 90's alternative band Limblifter. If you liked this post, please either share, comment, like or subscribe. Thank You!

This week’s band Limblifter was on my radar back in the 90s and early 2000s, but I don’t recall hearing their music until much later.

I remember that album cover, though. Mostly because my brother had a magazine with a promotional ad for it on a car trip to visit my grandparents and I remember drawing fashion sketches of the ladies. I would have been about 11 at the time.

Limblifter were actually a side project for the rock band Age Of Electric. Age Of Electric consisted of two sets of brothers: Todd and John Kerns and Ryan and Kurt Dahle.

Age Of Electric were successful, and by the looks of things, candidates for a future post. That said, I’m going to focus and Limblifter and the Dahle brothers instead.

The Dahle brothers recruited a third member, bassist Ian Somers, and formed Limblifter as a side project.

“Screwed It Up” was issued as a single by MCA/Mercury towards the end of 1995. Around spring 1996 (I remember seeing the ad with their album art around March, I think), their self-titled debut was released.

I can’t seem to find any video for “Screwed It Up” despite the single being the bands biggest hit on the RPM charts (#69). Here’s footage of Limblifter performing it live at Toronto’s famed Horseshoe tavern instead:

Two more singles, “Cordova” and “Tinfoil” followed. The only music video for an early single I could find was one for “Tinfoil”. Had I heard “Tinfoil” before, this would have been the song I would have focused on. This is really heavy, crunchy power pop with some catchy chord changes.

A video was also made for the track “Vicious”. This one is a bit more ambitious, as it’s shot at a racetrack and features the band performing to a (rather small) audience during a car race:

Label issues and a new Age Of Electric album (1997’s Make A Pest A Pest) kept Limblifter from releasing more music right away. Somers announced his departure in April 1998, and a replacement, Todd Fancey was brought in.

With the new lineup in place, and after a switch within Universal Records to their own Limblifter label, 2000’s Bellaclava was released. I remember reading about them in Access All Areas or one of those free magazines you used to be able to grab in the mall around this time. They weren’t really on my radar, and they fell straight off after that. I feel like at this time, a lot of really good alternative music was slipping from mainstream view. What was popular was generally awful pop music, boybands, nu-metal, or middle-of-the-road rock bands (Nickleback). For context, I remember reading the article on a trip during Easter vacation. At the time I was probably the only person in existence who had just bought Chumbawamba’s WYSIWYG album, the poor-selling follow-up to their 1997 smash Tubthumper.

Surprisingly, Limblifter did OK. While Bellaclava wasn’t a platinum smash, the singles "Ariel vs. Lotus" and "Wake Up to the Sun" garnered radio play. I hadn’t heard either song before but liked “Wake Up To The Sun” when I played it while writing this piece.

The following year, Fancey and Kurt Dahle left to focus on The New Pornographers. My cut-off for this series is the mid-2000s, making The New Pornographers a future Beyond The Guess Who post candidate. I used to play their Twin Cinema album a lot in college.

A new version of Limblifter emerged in 2004 to release the album i/o. The new lineup consisted of Ryan Dahle, guitarist David Patterson, drummer Brent Follett, and new bassist Megan Bradfield. The lineup has changed again over the past twenty years with Dahle and Bradfield remaining the only constants.

From what I can find, “Jumbo Jet Headache” was the single from i/o. I found the song boring, so moving on, Limblifter had a nine-year hiatus after i/o. They finally re-emerged in 2015 with Pacific Milk.

“Dopamine” was the lead single and it’s so much better than their 2004 material.

A video was shot and released as well:

Another six years passed until the band released their most recent album, Little Payne towards the end of 2022. Here’s “Haystack Rock”. I liked this one.

I like writing these and finding out that the band or artist I’m writing about is still active and making solid music. Almost 30 years on, Limblifter is still recording and maintains a steady online presence. Their website mentioned a series of shows in British Columbia and Ontario about a month ago (as of this writing).

Next Week: Bubbling Under: Frida of ABBA fame.