Review of Car Button Cloth by Danny Ecclestone
From Q September 1996
The title refers to an experiment Evan Dando was asked to perform for a Second Grade "science" project: fill a bath, select three objects, observe which sank and which didn't. Dando chose a toy racing car, a piece of cloth and a button. They all sank. Always prepared to let the tiny detail tell the big story, it's a very Dando metaphor. Spells in rehab have punctuated his life since the release of 1993's Come On Feel The Lemonheads. Months spent stalking Oasis around Europe briefly made him rock's most public embarrassment. His solo tour of '95 proved a farrago of tics and eccentricities, missing his arranged slot at Glastonbury's acoustic tent, eventually to outstay his welcome in front of an audience baying for Portishead. car button cloth is full of pointers to those bad days. "There's something missing from my life", hollers the overwhelming Something Missing, repeatedly, with Dando, straining to be heard above the meanest band he's ever assembled, finding something like the voice of Kurt Cobain and reminding us that for all his goofy blondness, alleged independent wealth and jauntier gib, Dando's songs have similarly failed to blink at the dulled tragedy and lost bearings of slackerdom. This time though, it's personal, exponentially darker, with the coagulated Losing Your Mind and the superficially blithe Hospital (full of "green, green leaves falling from the trees") mining autobiographical fears. It's gripping in a way that the crafty, but ultimately trite C'mon Feel The Lemonheads wasn't. car button cloth's supporting cast includes Cobain-endorsed Scot and ex-Vaseline Eugene Kelly (co-composer of this album's first single, If I Could Talk I'd Tell You) and brutish Dinosaur Jr drummer "Murph", with co-songwriting succour lent by Epic Soundtracks, Smudge's Tom Morgan but not Noel Gallagher, whose dim Purple Parallelogram collaboration was legally barred from "gracing" the final LP. Together they've conspired to make an alcoholic racket, perfunctorily engineered and perfectly suited to the punchy, self-dissatisfied mood set by Dando. Even the throwaway stuff leaves a bitter, disorientating taste: Knoxville Girl's bloody, trad arr murder ballad, 6ix's retreading of serial slaughter movie Seven and the out-and-out Metallica impression of closing instrumental, Secular Rockulidge. The last is indication enough of how perverse a record this is. There's barely a trace of the Dando of It's A Shame About Ray barring his enduring mastery of the heady leap from verse into chorus, and what is left is an awkward but magnetically honest instance of mental spring-cleaning, as Black Sabbath as it is Burrito Brothers. One hopes he's feeling better now.