Customer Reviews

Lemonheads

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Remarkably Evan Dando,has brought back the Lemonheads after 10 years. More remarkably- the album they made is excellent. With edgy rockers,Bill Stevenson on drums & Karl Alvarez on bass- the Lemonheads manage to keep their old melodic rock sound yet also sound modern and edgy at the same time! The result is a CD that really rocks and is great fun to listen to.
My favorites on The CD are Rule of Three, the murderballad Baby's Home, the goth punk Black Gown,the heartfelt rocker Steve's Boy ,the near pychedelic closer December , and the slashing, wryly humorous political song Let's Just Laugh.
If you are a fan of the previous versions of the Lemonheads -you will like the 21st century version just fine. Buy it and enjoy!

Sounds like the Descendents w/ Evan Dando on lead vocals. Well, that's what it is! I'm pretty into it.

I don't know if it's just a case of not listening to "the Lemonheads" in a while, but damn if this isn't the best record I heard in a long time. (And let's not diminish the contributions of the "non-Dando's" on this record).
This better not be the only album from this line-up. That would be a crime. (I would think the self-titling of this album means a new beginning).

The newest Lemonheads album is, as others have mentioned, a true return to form. The songs are short and don't overstay their welcome. Great toe-tapping tunes that bring a smile to your face. I highly, highly recommend this album for both new and old fans.

Great CD if you like the lemonheads. Nice cross between pop/punk and some OG country chops. The CD has the same feel as some of the early lemonheads stuff that turned me in to a fan. Hope there's another CD sometime before the next 10 years.

I am a long time Lemonheads/Dando fan and when I heard a new Lemonheads album was coming I got very excited. His recent solo effort showed that he still has so much talent to explore and it would be ashame for Dando to fade into obscurity.

The new album is indeed excellent. You can listen to it all the way through without skipping a song (a rarity these days). I only hope the live shows live up to Evan's Live at the Brattle release - if you ever listened to the Lemonheads in the past, this is a must buy. If you have never heard them - give this disc a listen - try "Pittsburgh" "In Passing" "Baby's Home" or any of the other tracks - they are all gems.

For those of you who haven't followed Evan Dando's career since 'disbanding' the Lemonheads in 1997, let me quickly catch you up to speed. He has released (although not in the US) a live acoustic disc (great renditions of lemonheads songs Lovey through Car Button Cloth) with an accompanying EP of country roots covers. Then a few years back came the release of Evan's first solo album "Baby I'm Bored," which I feel was an album Dando was always destined to make. Its really quite good if given a chance.

Recently, the most recent reincarnation of the Lemonheads have been playing infrequent shows to relatively good reception and Dando later began working with Bill Stevenson and Karl Alvarez on a new Lemonheads LP. The result up with the best work Dando has released during his stint with Atlantic. In short, fans of 'Ray' will be more than happy with this disc. The melodies are still there and Evan's voice is still strong. The most notable improvement is in the musicianship. J Mascis on guitar doesn't hurt either (still waiting for that new Dino Jr album...).

My favorites include classic Lemonheads songs like "In Passing;" the straight ahead rock of "No Backbone" and "Become the Enemy;" and the country tinged number more alike Dando's recent work "Baby's Home". Even the slightly psychedelic vibe on "Lets Just Laugh" (which would have fit in well on 1996's Car Button Cloth) sounds different but equally great.

In short, if you like melody, rock and roll, or past Lemonheads albums, you are sure to find this release worth the money.

Ten years, worth the wait? Well I didn't actually stand around waiting for this, it is a nice surprise. If you are a Lemonheads fan, I am sure you will find this album on par, and maybe better, than the "last" Lemonheads release, Car Button Cloth. But compared to Evan's solo disc, Baby I'm Bored, this is way better!! The production is nice, and the backup band (Bill and Karl from ALL/Decendents) packs a punch not seen/heard on a Lemonheads record since their punkier days in the late 80's (whoah, I am dating myself!). Fans of Lemonheads will not be disappointed with this release, as it contains all the hooks, smooth vocals, wry lyrics, and jangly guitars that make this band/artist great. A solid release IMHO, because it's as good as anything Evan's ever done.

HOLY SH-T! A new Lemonheads record. We can not tell you how absolutely thrilling that is. Sure, their last record sucked. And Evan Dando's solo stuff was pretty mediocre. And maybe he is kind of a pr-ck. But c'mon! So what?! It's A Shame About Ray was one of the world's most perfect slabs of heartbreaking indie jangle. I don't even really do drugs but "My Drug Buddy" had me absolutely wishing I had my own drug buddy. Could anything be more romantic? Go a little further back, Lovey, Lick, Hate Your Friends, the perfect collision of punk rock brattiness and pop song perfection. And they just kept getting better and better. I can't really think of another band that occupied so much space on pretty much every single mix tape I ever made. Even covering Suzanne Vega's "Luka" which could have and should have been a disaster, ended up sounding miles better than the original. Anyway, any pop kid worth anything is at their very heart, a huge Lemonheads obsessive. How could you not be?

So a brand new Lemonheads record is a seriously big deal. And as if we couldn't be more excited, the other 2/3 of the Lemonheads is basically the Descendents!!! Bill Stevenson and Karl Alvarez, F-CK YEAH.

So now we've pretty much got the dream band. So how does the new Lemonheads stack up? Well, we've only had this record for a few days, but since the second it's come in we've been listening to it nonstop, and it's growing on us like crazy. Dando's voice is a little deeper, a little more scratchy and weathered sounding, but it suits him, and the new material. The sound is just so instantly familiar it's like a big ol' indie rock hug.

Sh-t, we've been in indie rock heaven lately. Sebadoh III, Archers Of Loaf's Icky Mettle, and now a new Lemonheads. Almost makes us feel like we're in college again. Anyway, imagine It's A Shame About Ray, a little less laid back, a little more mature, but the same sort of mix of sweet jangly minor key laments and super rocking kick a-s power pop. The hooks aren't as immediately obvious as they were on Ray, but the more we listen, the more we find ourselves getting bits and pieces lodged firmly in our heads. We're guessing that after spending a few more weeks with it, this might be one of our favorite pop records of the year.

Whether one sees it as a reunion disc, a comeback album, or long-delayed follow-up, The Lemonheads is an admirable effort. (Granted, it's not really a reunion, since Evan Dando is the only one who played with The Lemonheads before.) Given that Dando's output since the dimise of the band a decade ago hasn't exactly been prolific, one is right to worry about whether he could come up with a new set of songs worthy of the Lemonheads moniker. Fortunately, he has surrounded himself with plenty of musical talent on The Lemonheads, including J Mascis, two former members of The Decendents, and - in the weirdest guest spot since Dando teamed with Rick James - Garth Hudson of The Band. Long-time songwriting partner Tom Morgan also contributes on two tracks. It is this prodigious pool of talent, with its direct and indirect links to The Lemonheads' glory days, that lends this album a sense of legitimacy and purpose that such "comeback" albums are prone to sorely lack.

Not surprisingly, Dando wrote or co-wrote nine of the eleven songs on the record. However, drummer Bill Stevenson fits nicely into the grooves of Dando's style with his two contributions, "Become the Enemy" and "Steve's Boy", which features J Mascis on guitar. Dando sings them as if they were his own, and his voiced hasn't aged well or badly; in fact, it hasn't aged at all. As for his own songs, Dando delivers the goods in a belated but predictably fine form. The album starts out as sure-footedly as ever with "Black Gown", and goes on to include "Pittsburgh" and "Poughkeepsie" (neither of which are actually about those towns), as well as the equally fine "Rule of Three", "No Backbone" (also featuring Mascis), "In Passing", and "December". The lyrics aren't quite as clever or pun-laden as they used to be, but we are at least treated to "I'm glad to be your lump of clay", "With a pouch of myrrh and frankincense/And a walk across the desert sands/You might find your baby Frankenstein", and "It's early in the day/Still it's late enough to say you were a liar/And the truth becomes more clear as I get higher".

Dando does includes a few more "serious" songs on this album. The first of these, "Let's Just Laugh", dares the listener to make light of the fumbles of the Bush administration, and risks a visit from the FBI with the lyric "two more years to kill/if you want [or won't] I will". The second of these tracks, "Baby's Home", is a country-flavored tale of a man who refuses to deal reasonably with his wife's infidelity. Instead, he rhetorically asks, as the classic film title did, "they shoot horses, don't they?" Also, Stevenson's "Steve's Boy" is about a rift between father and son who can't live without each other. It is refreshing that Dando is willing to include songs of greater depth than the typical Lemonheads song, but he knows as well as anyone else does that he will never be thought of as a serious songwriter. But fans of The Lemonheads tune in after all these years to be entertained, not to be preached to.

And entertain is certainly what The Lemonheads does. In terms of quality, it is pretty much exactly what one would expect: better than Car Button Cloth but not as good as It's A Shame About Ray. Thus, it gets the same rating as Come On Feel the Lemonheads. The Lemonheads will never make a capital G-Great album, but as long as they are as good as they tend to be, a new one will always be welcome. Meanwhile, these lyrics to "No Backbone" might best sum up this album's aesthetic: "Addictively I'll stick to the safety of the script/But I know I'll end up settling for a less than perfect fit".