The Lemonheads Album Recommendations

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

The Lemonheads

[#] It's a Shame About Ray (1992)

Two minute blasts of underachievement.

Reviewed July 7, 2024

This right here? This wonderfully blasé, sunshinin', acoustic-electric Australian-American slacker heroin junkie half-hour pop rock album? This is one of my greatest used CD shop finds point blank period. As a teenager, I'd ship off for a month out of the year to stay with my sister wherever the church had her stationed, and we always made it a point every trip to visit a used record store and pick up something entirely based on the cover. You can imagine the strangeness we'd uncover (I will cover that Old Time Relijun record someday), but then came bands like The Lemonheads! I knew of Evan Dando from his occasional work with the Dandy Warhols and figured that anyone who's played with the Dandys can't be all that bad. I was so right, it's painful.

It's a Shame About Ray's appeal is entirely in its simplicity. Songs like the mildly mournful "Confetti" and the handclap love anthem "Kitchen" are upbeat, powered by strummed acoustics and churning electrics all playing chord progressions simple enough that you could play them your first time picking up a guitar. The vocal mixture of Evan Dando, occasionally so sleepy on comedowns like "My Drug Buddy" and "Hannah & Gabi" that he almost nods off in front of you, and the sweetly bipolar Juliana Hatfield (who does a scarily dead-on angry little boy voice on "Bit Part") is so zingy and likable, it sucks they only had two albums together. This is pop written by a guy who will throw an award away after getting it, music for the common folk written by the counterculture—and the unaccompanied unplugged cover of "Frank Mills" from the 60s hippie musical Hair that closes out the record seems keenly aware of that.

(My copy does not have "Mrs. Robinson" on it. It's alright as a cover, but it doesn't add much to the actual album, so get it as its own single if you really want it.)