Sunday, June 22, 2014

Album Review: The Lemonheads - Car Button Cloth

The Lemonheads sixth album, Car Button Cloth was released in 1996, three years after its predecessor and it's a kind of a messy one.  Less countrified than their early nineties material, at its best it contains some wonderful power pop.  The opening one-two It's All True and If I Could Talk I'd Tell You are fine examples of this lurching, rollicking style.
Break Me is an impassioned, relatively heavy track where the at times barely lucid Evan Dando is reduced to desperate pleas of "break me" over hard-riffing guitars.  The Outdoor Type is a clever, classic pop tune about the joys of indoor pursuits backed by an easy, effortless pop melody, and later C'mon Daddy is almost as sweet-sounding.
Unfortunately the rest of the album is a bit of a mess.  Losing Your Mind may have been semi-autobiographical and is a passionate, ragged rocker, while the band's version of Knoxville Girl is passable.  Heavy rockers Something's Missing, 6ix and One More Time were presumably great fun in the studio but add little to the album.
The album is frontloaded with the stronger tracks which just about keep things on an even keel.  Worth checking out.

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