The Lemonheads – Love Chant: Album Of The Week

Artwork for The Lemonheads album Love Chant

The Lemonheads released their new album this week and received a 4* review from Live4ever – revisit it and stream ‘Love Chant’ right here.

Always an easy way to open up any piece about The Lemonheads is to use the box of chocolates analogy; most of the albums from Evan Dando’s mothership have fitted neatly into a you-just-don’t-know-what-you’re-going-to-get envelope.

This of course is fine, as when you get the good stuff with your favourite centres the effect – even almost forty years on from the irascible, Boston-made debut Hate Your Friends – is a unique musical sugar rush all of its own.

Equally however, the singer has at times brought his own cliches, most notably those about drug use and addiction, a past dealt with in his forthcoming and knowingly entitled autobiography Rumours Of My Demise.

Dando, whatever stage of life he’s in, will never be a finished project (as reports of a recent stage break down illustrate), but Love Chant arrives with him settled in Brazil, newly married to Antonia Teixeira and having sobered up once more – ingredients that, amongst many others, enabled the recording of what is only the third Lemonheads album in the last quarter of a century.

Being in South America was, he’s admitted, the key to having fewer distractions but the process was also made easier by working with a number of familiar collaborators including J. Mascis, Juliana Hetfield, Tom Morgan and Nick Saloman of The Bevis Frond.

Given the history, any assumption that a new start and old comrades would necessarily lead to a clean break however seems like a foolish one, a view Deep End seems to partially confirm.

With their relationship going back to It’s A Shame About Ray, co-writer Morgan helps the song lyrically fish in troubled waters (“So you’re showing all the symptoms/Coughing up a ghost/Going into treatment/Better double down the dose”), whilst a bristling Mascis solo perforates the guilt trip.

Diarising as a confession isn’t a bad thing though, and Love Chant’s opener 58 Second Song relies heavily on the phrase-as-chorus vehicle acolytes will recognise – plus a less expected key change – and ploughs on fuzzily with a carefree air of decades past.

Click here for the review in full