The Lemonheads - Disc of the day

The Lemonheads
car button cloth

(East/West, 1996)

Evan Dando crawls out of the gutter. The blood, as they say, is on the tracks.

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 had dominated his life since the 1993 release of Come On Feel The Lemonheads and car button cloth is full of pointers to his period of submersion, from the confessional frenzy of Something Missing to the superficially blithe, deeply morbid Hospital, full of “green, green leaves falling from the trees”. Lending succour are a mean band driven brutishly by Dinosaur drummer Murph, and co-songwriters including Epic Soundtracks, Smudge’s Tom Morgan and ex-Vaseline Eugene Kelly – co-composer of If I Could Talk I’d Tell You, a winsome ditty based on Dando’s Zoloft-deadened rehab routine. The group make an alcoholic racket, perfunctorily engineered and perfectly suited to the irascible, self-dissatisfied mood set by Dando, and while there is throwaway material here, it’s overwhelmed by the whole: as magnetically honest a display of mental spring-cleaning as you could wish for.

Danny Eccleston

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 15/04/2008