One of those I came across was the Lemonheads' first record, Hate Your Friends, on the TAANG! label. I remember buying this one on vinyl, circa 1987, with no idea who they were or what they sounded like (Ok - I was guessing punk. I told my roommate that I bought the record because the guys on the record sleeve looked like us). Where I bought it is a funny cultural history, too: this Boston-based band was in the "import" section of the record store at the Ford City Shopping Center (on the Southwest Side of Chicago, where you'd think somebody would know better, but you're wrong because on the South Side, everything's 20 years behind and they are still waiting for Nevermind to come out).
Hate Your Friends is thrashy, lo-fi, unprofessional, sometimes sophomoric, sometimes stupid, and it's filled with hook after hook. My eight year old, who just this weekend was begging us to play Katy Perry's "Titanium" was, just two weekends ago, singing along with "Second Chance" by the time the first chorus ended.
So when I rediscovered this record, it lead me to pull out some other early Lemonheads' stuff (Lick, Lovey, Creator, which, when combined as a single CD release with Hate Your Friends, creates the great disc title Create Your Friends). And it also led me to All Music, the great one-stop shop online for record and band info, which led me right back into my continuing frustration with AllMusic--they keep on disagreeing with me in their reviews. But it's more than that--it's the subtle inaccuracies and blanket judgments that are so questionable.
I was expecting the AllMusic line on the Lemonheads to be something about how this great 80s thrashy punk band eventually got engulfed by Evan Dando's ego and drifted toward syrupy indie alternalite. But I should have known. AllMusic reviews frequently are biased toward overemphasizing a perfect final package--
(see, for example, this review of Elvis Costello's Brutal Youth), and so it is with Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review of Hate Your Friends, which calls it "a bit unfocused, spending most of its time thrashing around in post-Hüsker Dü hardcore punk." Fair enough, but a bit dismissive of a record that is in many ways more listenable than its successors, such as Creator, which Erlewine calls a "winning second album." (Evidence: Battle of the Bands: Lemonheads, circa Creator: 1 2 vs. Lemonheads, circa Hate Your Friends 1 2).
Most everyone I know considers Creator to be a weak sophomore slump-kind of lp, mostly forgettable but for a nice cover of "Plaster Caster." It's the follow-up to Creator, Lick, where the Lemonheads put together a splendid combo of post-punk mess and a little indie sugar courtesy of Dando. Erlewine gets it right when he says the record's "unevenness" (with these two very different kinds of songs) makes it sound kind of messy. But he also claims that Dando's songs are so much better than his bandmate Ben Deily's songs. Again, you decide: Deily Deily Dando Dando. Dando, clearly, ultimately, is the better songwriter, but I don't think it's that clear. After this record, Deily left the group and the reformed Dando-led Lemonheads reached some modest success with a cover of "Mrs. Robinson" and a few other originals ("Into your arms" "It's a Shame About Ray").
Rediscovering these records again, though I like a lot of the Dando-centric version of Lemonheads, I'm seeing Lick as a great blueprint for alternative rock that never quite materialized. It's only a blueprint because it is, in many ways, a mess. But the Deily songs emerge as a clear evolution from his songs on Hate Your Friends, carving out some post-punk space that stands as a point of contrast to Dando's songs, which really owe more to Paul McCartney than punk rock. Erlewine and the AllMusic hindsight machine, sweeps all this away once again--much easier to just celebrate the gradual emergence of tunesmith Dando than to give credit to Deily. That must be why, when Erlewine gives props to Dando's "knack for pop hooks" on the otherwise disposable Lemonheads' debut, Hate Your Friends, he credits Dando for "Second Chance," which the site lists as a Deily composition.
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