Review of Car Button Cloth by Ted Kessler
From NME 28th September 1996
For one so royally f---ked up,
Evan Dando’s a very tidy craftsman. Perhaps it’s the one focal
point in the aching blur of his life. Perhaps it explains and excuses the
mess he’s made of day-to-day pop stardom, sweeps away the worst excesses
of his semi-tragic celebrity buffoonery.
But caressing the sharp, rhythmic lines and upward curves of melodic loveliness
that fatten ‘Car Button Cloth’ it’s easy to forget Dando’s
recent history. It’s hard to credit, for instance, the scene a year
ago in which Evan Dando is standing handcuffed, tripping on acid, and bleeding
in Sydney Airport insisting the police release him so he can retrace his steps
around the globe to find his mind. He’d lost it on the way in, you see,
and knew it was still out there somewhere.
So ‘Car Button Cloth’ smacks a guilty conscience hard. It embarrasses
the memory of how easy it was to laugh at Evan as he stumbled on stage with
Oasis, banging a tambourine and dribbling beer down his front during record-shop
instores. It shames scurrilous notions that there was anything more to the
photos of Dando and Kurt Cobain’s widow in bed together than stupid
drug buddydom. And it reminds you how quickly we all forgot the wholesome
sweetness of his songs and instead dwelled on his slow and public self-demolition.
This, then, his seventh Lemonheads album, is the story of a trust-funded,
former crack-smoking, ex-junkie pop star from Boston who became the most roundly
ridiculed man in rock simply for looking cute and acting dopey, and how he
emerged with his soul scarred but his talent intact. It’s not quite
as astounding a resurrection as Shaun Ryder’s, and at times the ride’s
a little rugged, but it’s a pretty nimble escape all the same.
And don’t expect the earth, because this is a story that runs out of
steam halfway through. After an opening burst of seven delightfully conceived
songs things start to sag somewhat and – bar a couple – the remaining
six songs sound more like B-sides compared with the brilliance that’s
preceded them. You can see Evan’s shoulders drooping halfway through
as the toll of telling his story hits home. Remember, this is a man whose
biggest trauma on his last album revolved around the loss of a favourite T-shirt
when his girlfriend split.
We’re posted a clear a sign of Evan’s present emotional state
with the last line of the first song, ‘It’s All True’. As
the jaunty country-rock coda is rejoined one last time Evan sighs, ‘I
don’t wake up with a sudden start, but with empty arms and a broken
heart.’ This loneliness can at least be vocalised, however, unlike the
solitude he speaks of in the undiluted Lemon pop ‘If I Could Talk I’d
Tell You’ where he recounts the woe of being interviewed whilst unable
to talk through crack abuse. He ends the song whistling the gentle hookline,
proving there’s hope for us all.
Elsewhere there’s the funerally-paced blues explosion of ‘Losing
Your Mind’ – only Brian Wilson has written songs about madness
that sounds a softly beautiful and sad as this. This only time Evan’s
voice cracks on the album is here as he sings, “Tired, tired, tie a
knot and try to untie it/Just can’t decide if I should lie/Or tell the
truth and try to hide it,” over and over and over again. Until fade.
And we laughed at him…
He tries to provide light relief with a version of a traditional country song,
‘Knoxville Girl’, but instead this is where ‘Car Button
Cloth’ first hits choppy waters. ‘6is’ is a flabby wade
through distortion that’s apparently about Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed
head in Seven; ‘One More Time’ sounds like the sort of thing leather-capped
rocking buskers knock out on the underground and the closing instrumental
‘Secular Rockulidge’ is pretty ugly metal. Only the soft-focus
country of ‘C’mon Daddy’ holds things up at this end of
the show.
But there’s a trio of songs soon after the album’s dawn for which
any later laziness can be forgiven. ‘Break Me’ is a song of spectacular
longing and the record’s highlight; ‘Hospital’ is prime
dinky Dando and speaks gently and tunefully of – perhaps – institutionalised
madness; while his reading of Smudge’s ‘The Outdoor Type’
wears a huge, shaggy, self-deprecating grin. “I can’t go away
with you on a rock climbing weekend,” he croons as the song lollipops
away behind him, “what if something’s on TV and it’s never
shown again?”
Unusually for an album this well-constructed, you leave worried about it’s
author’s welfare. You hope that somewhere out there there’s someone
in whom he can put his trust, someone who’ll look after him if things
go haywire again. Evan Dando’s gentle and honest, but his soul is frightfully
bruised. ‘Car Button Cloth’ is his sweet swoon for help.