Lemonheads - 'Lick' (Taang!)

The Lemonheads mean way more to me than they should, but I suspect a lot of people of my demographic cohort (white middle class American born 1980) feel the same way. None of this has much to do with Lick, or their other earlier records, but everything to do with the one that comes next (in this project, not Creator). But Lick has stuck around in my collection for awhile because I get a kick out of it, though there's only a few songs to justify keeping it. I think Ben Deily's songs are generally OK though the Lemonheads of course improved when he left and the Juliana Hatfield lineup happened. Some early Deily punkers such as  'Second Chance' are pretty great, and 'Ever' is his gem here; but Lick starts to bring in the jangle on Dando's songs, which are reaching towards the beauty he'd find later, so the distance between the two as songwriters is really made more evident. Deily's are just kind of a mess here – the Italian language 'Cazzo di Ferro' is bad throwaway soft metal, sounding like what happens when pop-punk bands try to get heavy (the post-Descendents band All is often guilty of this); '7 Powers' is driven by his reedy voice and a savage guitar solo, which disguises the fact that it's not so well-writtenng.  'Anyway' approaches replayability, but it's a stretch as well; we have to wait to 'Ever', the closer, for his peak. But Dando here really starts to shine. His gentle drawl, when combined with the amped up energy behind opener 'Mallo Cup', makes instant punk bubblegum magic; that's one of the best Lemonheads songs and the best song on the album, so it's a shame it comes first. This is the one with their cover of Suzanne Vega's 'Luka' on it, which starts with a 'noise' guitar intro and gets pretty crunchy during the choruses; it is not one of my favourite Lemonheads songs, but I guess the one that people remember most from this record. After 'Luka' though, it's hard to get through the next few songs until 'Ever' arrives, but maybe I'm just excited to get through this LP so I can write about the next one that's on deck. The real joy of Lick comes from flipping over the cover and looking at the band photo on the back, which sums up the Lemonheads perfectly. They're young as hell, and cute, and just a little bit of faux-tough there too; they could be a youth crew band or a Christian rock ensemble, and that also sums up the musicianship – they could have gone in a lot of directions, and on this record they started to.

Lemon Kittens - 'We Buy a Hammer for Daddy' (United Dairies Produce)

The Lemon Kittens only made two records before disbanding, though Danielle Dax went on to a somewhat more renowned solo career. It's a shame, because their art-school outbursts feel remarkably prescient in 2019, and (to my ears, today) especially British. United Dairies released this, and there's certainly a feel that is closer to early Nurse With Wound than anything appearing on Rough Trade at the time, although it's far more song-based and rock in nature than Chance Meeting. I hear the undeniable influence of the Residents, at least in tone and instrumental interplay ('The American Cousin' and 'Rome Burning' could be featuring Snakefinger as a guest musician, though everything played on this record was either Blake or Dax), and there's an energy in the more madcap tracks that definitely is fuelled by some frustration, even there aren't overtly social-leaning tendencies in the lyrics. More reference points can be teased out (Beefheart, early electronic composition, probably Throbbing Gristle) but it's not necessary to place this into a lineage, even though that's my vestigial habit. Time has been extremely kind to We Buy a Hammer for Daddy, and this feels like a crucial piece in that wonderful, fertile period of British music where the avant-garde collapsed onto rock forms and a lot of weird stuff snuck through the cracks. Today's pop scene, at least the kind of pop that gets written about in publications such as The Quietus, surely has the same sense of freedom and juxtaposition, though I feel far closer to older material, personally. And there's just so much going on here, vocally especially ('Motet' is just magic, where Dax/Blake have a pretty great interplay that complemented each other well). Even the loose and exploratory parts (side two opens with 'Pain Topics', which flutters around under the shouted vocals and razorblade guitars, which eventually cascade into a wall of sound) feel like they have a vision, a pathway towards something that is never without consequence. Furthermore, it feels like a balanced duo – I don't know enough about either musician outside of this record, so I shouldn't make this declaration, but I feel like this is a pure 50/50 mix between their two personalities. There's a wonderful world envisioned here, and I want to explore it.