Review of Come On Feel The Lemonheads
by Paul Moody
From NME 9th October 1993
First, the good news: this album
will drive people mad. For Evan Dando, deeply dippy, crack smokin', high priest
of
slackerdom, has actually managed to create the perfect pop album his interviews
have been telling us about all year.
Which is sort of weird. Because from doe-eyed dreamer under pink blankets
in Oz (Evan as Chippendale) to grinning
loon splashing around in the surf in LA (Evan as airhead) the subtext has
always been the same - that underneath it all,
the pressure of being pinned to bedroom walls for 12 months was getting too
much for Boston's dry-throated king
of sleepwalking cool.
And just as the grumbling mass
of cynics had finally worked out a way to incarcerate him for ever on charges
of
being, a) David Cassidy (oh pleeaase) or, b) a one-off great album maker,
he comes back with the glorious splurge of
melody that is 'Come On Feel...'. The gilt-edged get-out-of-jail-free card.
Don't expect the earth. We are dealing with a man, remember, whose idea of genuine emotional trauma revolves around the loss of a T-shirt when you break up with your girl/boyfriend, after all ('Favourite T'). Its just that when the tunes are fine, The Lemonheads' soppy fizzed-up takes on pop-grunge haven't got a single peer you could glimpse without binoculars. The opening The Great Big No' says it all. The drums and guitar clatter over themselves furiously, a huge smile of a tune emerges within 30 seconds and Evan as ever drops in a lyric (shared with Juliana Hatfield) that suggests floods of tears, smashed plates and break-ups, and ends nonchalantly resigned and somehow happier for it. It's a warm up for 'Into Your Arms' (a peculiar first single choice seeing as its bubblegum love-stuff feel, care of its author Robyn St Clare, can only inflame the dreamboat caucus) but it's wonderful nonetheless, and as near to mid-summer romance as early October is ever likely to get.
'It's About Time' (favourite line:
"Patience is like bread I say i ran out of it yesterday') and 'Down About
It' are both
splendid journeys into self-doubt; a late night 'Drug Buddy' and a Buzzcocks-esque
neurotic pop thrill respectively, but
they're immediately overshadowed by 'Paid To Smile' - with its
remarkably clear-headed lyric: "The cigarette girl took off
her tray/And dropped her dress in a shiny pile" - and the much discussed
(and Evan's favourite) 'Big Gay Heart'. Both
display a tenderness and soft Gram Parsons twang that elevate them way beyond
the razored-edge chiming we
expect from the Lemonheads and onto a perpetual orbit inside your head.
The flipside comes with 'Style',
which finds Evan kicking against the prickles of fame, and even against the
world
weariness it instils in him, by flooding the song with an endless litany of
contrary demands over the most bloodshot
chord-chugging he'll ever be tempted into ("Don't want to get stoned/But
I don't want to not get stoned"). Normal
service - not, incidentally, what we're after - returns with 'Rest Assured'
which turns away at the last minute just as
it's about to collide head on with 'Confetti', and suffers accordingly, but
the marvellously'Bandwagonesque'-esque
'Dawn Can't Decide' ensures the slip into Dando-by-numbers is quickly averted,
complete with a Banana Splits "Baba ba-ba" vocal from Juliana.
Strangely, all such notions of
formula are blown out of the water by the bizarre and slightly great 'Rick
James Style',
where the scattershot rage of earlier is transformed by James himself into
a Doors-ian dabble with drugged up psychosis-delia, smothered in Hammond organ
and reversing 'Revolver' guitar solos. After which Evan heads country
again ('Being Around'), loses his marbles ('Favourite T'), writes one last
great melody-line ('You Can't Take It With
You') and signs off with, of all things, a brief rumble along a grand piano
('The Jello Fund'), presumably in reference to
the Trust Fund that awaits him once pop stardom slips out of the back door
one day when he's at the beach.
In essence, then, 'Come On Feel
The lemonheads' is all it purports to be: a chance to dip into Evan's jumbled-up,
dope-smoking love-buggy of a life and celebrate it while we can, before things
get too heavy and stop working out. As
Evan would no doubt tell you himself, why spend your life under a cloud when
you can pack up your jeans, T-shirt and
sneakers and be somewhere on the other side of the world if you try hard enough.
Time, then, to behold one of pop's great dreamers. Long may he doze.
9/10