Review of The Best of The Lemonheads - The Atlantic Years
by Victoria Segal
From NME July 1998
For a form that prides itself
on forward-looking irreverence, popular music has a startling weakness for
the concept of The Classic, for engraving names on the monolith of rock history.
Of all the things that have been unkind to Evan Dando – drugs, the press,
short hair – time has been the unkindest of all.
The alt-rock poster-boy of the early-‘90s because a Nick Heyward for
the DM generation – blondly, blandly cute, sweetly endearing and with
an artistic reputation blown out like birthday candles. Evan was always better
at breaking hearts than new ground and it makes perfect sense that The Lemonheads’
biggest hit was a cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’,
much adored by weekend hippies. While Nirvana and Suede were soundtracking
lives, Dando’s ambition stretched to the few seconds of melancholy,
the joyful blip.
‘The Best Of The Lemonheads’ – mainly covering the time
from 1992’s ‘It’s A Shame About Ray’ to their last
album ‘Car Button Cloth’ – highlights both Dando’s
gifts and his insurmountably irritating flaws. Playing on his wide-eyed charms
with deceptive determination, he looked like the kind of boy who could get
it together to write songs but would probably find pedestrian crossings bewildering.
It was an image that gave sometimes ordinary songs a veneer of otherworldliness
and, more importantly, that moment-capturing magic. Over half these songs
are less than three minutes long – not because of any rigorous discipline,
you imagine, but more because he’d be wandering off in search of jelly
and coffee once he’d emptied his head. The tracks from ‘It’s
A Shame About Ray’ might be self-indulgent but they’re never ponderous:
‘My Drug Buddy’ creeping along like it hurts to lift its head;
the muted REM shades of the title track; the heartbreak-on-a-spoon of ‘Rudderless’
– these are silvery shards of songs, catching the light before dying
away.
Hearing all of them together, though, makes you realise how little they actually
had to reflect. By ‘Come On Feel The Lemonheads’, transfixed teenagers
were realising that if they just wanted something cute, they’d be better
off getting a hamster (no danger of that getting out a guitar for a campfire
singalong) and vulnerable mutated into punchable. When you know Dando’s
capable of a ling as sharp as. “Enough about us/Let’s talk about
me” from the sunbursting ‘It’s About Time’, the dreary
whimsy of ‘Being Around’ (“If were a dance floor would you
shake your thing?”) or the watery politics of ‘Big Gay Heart’
become all the more grating. Sounding like they were on commission from steel
guitar manufacturers doesn’t help, either; the tobacco-spitting country-rock
element sitting uneasily with Evan’s brand of deep-gazing sincerity
and permanent vacation in Slackerworld. ‘If I Could Talk I’d Tell
You’ is mere plaid-shirted Freddie And The Dreamers, while the closing
acoustic tracks – ‘Down About It’, ‘Into Your Arms’
– wear spiritual beards and ponchos, the loose end of an unravelling
plot.
As another blonde bombshell once sand, “Men grow cold as girls grow
old/And we all lose our charms in the end”. Evan would understand. Yet
somewhere in this collection, the charm is preserved. Blink and you’d
miss it, but that’s what makes it precious.