The Lemonheads – Love Chant: Album Review

Live4ever 24 October, 2025

Artwork for The Lemonheads album Love Chant

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Personality coming in and out of focus, of seeing first vulnerability and then detachment, has always been part of The Lemonheads’ appeal.

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.

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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.

Any listener to the expanded versions from The Lemonheads’ short lived imperial era will have noted the wonderfully diverse choice of cover versions – and an edging towards country, if not in its own terms.

The Key Of Victory re-embraces the idea, a meditative Evan Dando reflecting self-awareness (“I’m livin’ anarchy”) whilst the album’s producer Apollo Nove adds flecks of pastoral guitar.

Broader explanations and this and that’s may come in the book, but this personality coming in and out of focus, of seeing first vulnerability and then detachment, has always been part of Evan Dando’s personal appeal.

Be In neatly sums this effect up; starting with vocals not much more than a croak, it evolves into a quasi-love song in
psychedelic colours. Hug or hurt, you can’t help but feel something.

In this context, titling the closer Roky might be a coincidence but if parallels to the near legendary 13th Floor Elevators frontman’s experiences aren’t strictly linear, the remorseful words map out an unwilling re-entry to a club for dope users, ‘With a casual flip of a worthless coin’.

Maudlin? Not at all, and balancing light and shade has never really been something much heed has been paid to.

It’s appropriate then that the best song here is the playful In The Margin (“A full-on 8th grade girl revenge song,” according to its writer), a bittersweet, riff heavy stomp which is as disposable was you want it to be.

Despite the long wait, Love Chant underlines all the preconceptions whilst subtly confounding them.

The saddest boxes of chocolates are finished ones, and Evan Dando’s isn’t empty yet.

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Tags:andy peterson, the lemonheads