Review of Baby I'm Bored by Chris Leadbetter
From This Is London 19th March 2003
The history of music is littered with talented individuals who never quite fulfilled their potential. Evan Dando is undoubtedly one of them. As the photogenic, long-haired lead singer of The Lemonheads, he was one of the main players in the resurgence of the US rock scene in the early Nineties - a poster pin-up boy the girls could swoon over while the boys admired his catchy, inventive guitar music.
In 1992’s It’s A Shame About Ray and its 1993 successor Come On Feel The Lemonheads, Dando even made two of the era’s key albums, his distinctive brand of melodic indie pop thriving as a softer counterpart to the angry grunge flailings of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain or Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. The band’s energetic cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson even provided the band with a UK Top Five single.
Then, of course, it all went wrong. Dando lost himself to chemical excess, and the Lemonheads largely disappeared off the radar. A final album, Car Button Cloth, was released in 1996 to lukewarm reviews and limited sales, but Dando’s day seemed to have passed.
So the release of Baby I’m Bored is a dual shock. Not only has Dando sorted his head out enough to release a solo album, but he’s made a record of surprising quality. Although nothing on Baby I’m Bored pushes the envelope, sticking firmly to the jangly, country-tinged territory Dando has always considered his home, it is packed with warm, melodic songs that speak of lessons learned and experience garnered the hard way.
Album opener Repeat, for example, is a fine number, all crunchy guitars and soaring vocals (Reaching out to look inside/I got it wrong again), while My Idea is the wistful story of a break-up, told over a heart-rending tune. Why Do You Do This To Yourself?, on the other hand, is a country-tinged lament that finds Dando chiding the subject of his song for past mistakes, while All My Life is a stripped-down track which looks back in sorrow ("God knows what I thought I’d do/I bit my own sweet heart in two").
It’s not all brow-beating and recriminations, however. Waking Up is a bouncy, piano-driven anthem, while if Dando has written anything as unashamedly upbeat as Stop My Head since his heyday, few can have heard it. It’s not enough to make up for the chances wasted a decade ago, but with such solid songwriting on display again, one suspects that 2003 is a happier place for Evan Dando than he has inhabited in some time.