The Lemonheads make a head-bobbing return on Love Chant
"Love Chant"
OK, yes, fine, The Lemonheads have kept their hand in with two albums of covers – 2009's Varshons, and 2019's Varshons II – but this is the first album of original material in 19 years, and that’s the kind of gap that creates anxiety-laden expectation.
If you want to know what (apart from the cover albums and handful of tours) they have been doing in that time, well, bass player Farley Glavin and drummer John Kent have largely not been in The Lemonheads, and they appear here as impressive reminders of the band’s three-piece glory. With Glavin drilled by the 30th anniversary It’s a Shame About Ray tours, that’s hardly a surprise. Evan Dando? What’s he been doing? Thanks to what used to be called a multimedia blitz, the answer to that lies in his new diverting autobiography which opens with that most reliable of tropes: hitting rock bottom. While Guns N' Roses’ Duff McKagan still holds the prize for best bottom-of-rock-biog-opener, it is with wide-eyes and gaping maw that we approach Love Chant wondering how we get from a toothless caravaned junky Dando in the not-so-distant (see also: very recent) past to something that certainly sounds a lot like a band called The Lemonheads. Initially anyway.
It only takes a few bars of acoustic arpeggio before the trademark Lemonheads double-time boom-bap kicks in on “58 Second Song”, and, yes, it happens, even with Dando’s deeper tone: the years and anxiety do melt away, the head bobs pleasingly. Bobbing continues on “Deep End”, even as we get a glimpse of the addiction/withdrawal/rehab/tooth horror circus that has occupied Dando for longer than is reasonable.
And the impressive this-really-does-sound-like-solid-Lemonheads vibes continue through “In The Margin” and a slightly lazy “Wild Thing” which both is and isn’t that song.
There’s a pleasant sea-change at the mid-way point on “Togetherness Is All I’m After”, with the dropping tempo allowing some finer feeling and vocal range to return, but tracks like “Cell Phone Blues”, “Love Chant”, and “Marauders”, feel forced and lumpen. Coming after the reliable opening, this might be sequencing used as intent of a new direction, and the Lou-Reed-talky-mode of the perfectly nice but slight “The Key of Victory” supports this AOR theory. “Roky” closes and sounds every inch a closer from a time when these things mattered, which isn’t quite enough to make you count the years until the next album but enough to make you switch back to the sweet sounds of The Lemonheads on side one.
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