Lucky Pineapple is arguably Louisville’s best weird band. And this is arguably the weirdest wedding reception this side of Las Vegas.
The groom — wearing his finest black T-shirt — is on the small stage at the Rudyard Kipling, checking the sound of his guitar as his bandmates mill about. The bride is wearing a traditional wedding dress and sitting among friends in the chair nearest to her new life partner.
In minutes, William Benton and his bride, Jessica Faulkner, will both rock out — Benton on the stage, Faulkner watching from the audience — to the experimental post-rockish, jazzish, mamboish songs of Lucky Pineapple.
This atypical nuptial celebration is quite typical for a band which has made a habit in recent months of playing odd venues, such as Louisville Slugger Field and WDRB-TV’s early show, “Fox in the Morning.”
Now, Lucky Pineapple has an oddball album to accentuate its oddball reputation.
The road to release for the band’s first LP, “The Bubble Has Burst In Sky City,” is likewise off-kilter — although less in the fun, do-anything manner of the band’s music and more in the hair-pulling way of seemingly endless setbacks.
“It was an albatross around our necks for a while,” Benton said. “We’ve felt like we had to get it out for a while now.”
Five songs on “Bubble” — which will be release on Sept. 26 — were recorded in 2005, when a friend of the band lined up a free day to record at Electric Audio, the Chicago studio run by legendary producer Steve Albini. The band scrounged together money for a second day, and returned with plans to release those songs and maybe a couple others in 2006.
That never happened. Instead, little details — money diverted to buy equipment, troubles getting the album artwork together — piled up until it looked like “Bubble” might burst before ever being heard, Benton said.
All the while, the members of the seven-piece band debated whether to release the five songs from the Electric Audio sessions as an EP or to record five more songs and release a full-length album.
“It kind of seemed like it wasn’t going to come together at all a couple of times,” said guitarist and co-founder Matt Dodds. “It seemed like an endless series of smallish problems kept coming up.”
Things came together when the Louisville record label Noise Pollution agreed to release the album. Since then, Lucky Pineapple has shored up another difficult area by finding an agent to book out-of-town shows — which the band will do more of this fall. That also means a likely end to the band’s recent ubiquitousness in Louisville — two shows already in September with two more planned, Dodds said.
The band has built a fanbase through intensely entertaining live shows, but its experimental nature means some just don’t get it. Many songs on “Bubble” are instrumental, but they’re more pop than ambient. The rhythm is driving and often speedy, and with horns the songs take on a dramatic air.
“I can’t ever think of a single time we either did or didn’t do something because we thought people wouldn’t like it,” Dodds said. “I mean, it’s not like we’re going to play two notes repetitively for a half-hour — wait, actually we did something like that once.
“I think we’re all pretty much just amazed that anyone likes this and tells their friends about it. It’s awful weird music for people like my parents to like.”
