The more I listen to them, the more I like them. The more I like them, the more they push me to think about the relationship with the past. Because with their impeccably retro music, with their colorful and euphoric songs that seem to have been written in 1964 or 1974, with their seductive records made with talent, the Lemon Twigs push us to think that rock cannot go beyond what has been done and that the aesthetics of that glorious history remain. Worse still: that rock can say very little about today's world. That the only refuge left is a wonderful, colorful, comforting dream.
Lemon Twigs released last Friday A Dream Is All We Know, a red pill that takes you to an imaginary place where the beaches are sunny, the girls wear miniskirts, hints of marijuana are in the air, record players play music with heavenly vocal harmonies. That place is the idealized past. The Twigs even gave it a name, Merseybeach, which refers on the one hand to the Mersey river in Liverpool and therefore to the Mersey sound of the Beatles and similar, and on the other to the California of the Beach Boys, to their utopian idea of an infinite summer. There are echoes of the Byrds, Big Star, the Everly Brothers, the Who, so-called bubblegum pop and many other things, including 70s Wings. A Dream Is All We Know stands at the crossroads of all these influences, it's the record that Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney could have made if fifty years ago they had decided to write some songs together – without all that songwriting talent, it must be said.
The Lemon Twigs are essentially two brothers, Michael and Brian D'Addario, and what follows is a short recap that you can skip if you already know who they are, if you already love them or hate them. They come from Long Island, they are the sons of two musicians, Ronnie D'Addario and Susan Hall, they are precocious to say the least, it seems they already had a band in elementary school. They have gained experience with TV and cinema, developing a rather evident theatrical side, they care about their look as much as their music, they are children of show biz, which they frequented from the moment they realized that it was more fun than finding a 9 to 5 job.
They know the music, the technique, they master its history with enviable ease, not only for their age. Compared to their peers they are aliens. It's almost as if a capricious rock god forcibly took them from an old episode of Top of the Pops and immerse yourself in contemporaneity. The first job I give Hollywood It's from 2016. It's a kind of crazed, quotationist glam prog, just a little naive in the writing and perhaps also in the production of Jonathan Rado of Foxygen, another retromaniac. When they start writing it, one is 17 and the other 15, but they already seem like seasoned musicians. Also thanks to their parents who raised them on the bread and music of times gone by. Natalie Mering/Weyes Blood who hosted them on the disco Titanic Rising describes them by talking about them with Mojo like one sweet and balanced (Brian, who is now 27 years old), the other crazy and very rock'n'roll (Michael, 25). The two sometimes discuss how the music should be, a little more pop, a little less rock, but they always find the right solution.
And in fact they don't make a single mistake. Or maybe yes, they plan to release the second album Go to School (on the cover they call it a musical, okay) around a strange concept: a chimpanzee is raised like a human being. There are biographical traces, having the monkey as the adoptive parents of the musicians/actors, one played by Todd Rundgren, model for D'Addario, the other by their real mother. When the brothers left that sort of Broadway rock to ideally head towards the Sunset Strip, things went better. Four years ago it arrived Songs for the General Public, an exhilarating journey, practically perfect and with the pathos that was missing in the worlds of Elton John (their fans), Todd Rundgren, Paul McCartney, Meat Loaf. There was a credible piece despite the super vintage setting that invited you to live thinking about the future and a lot of other songs that you felt like you had always known, and instead…
It came out last year Everything Harmony. Iggy Pop and many others appreciated it, but the two seemed a little aged or perhaps just more quiet, sentimental and melancholic than usual, a little Simon & Garfunkel and a little Bee Gees. All very beautiful, done with the care that a lot of rock today lacks. However, there was a lack of the youthful restlessness and contagious lightheartedness of their other records. We find them in A Dream Is All We Know and that's good news. It's a record that's a bit of escapism and a bit not, in the sense that it fools you with the carefree tone of the music and makes you melancholic with its lyrics and harmonies. As in My Golden Years, premature lament of a young man who already sees life slipping away quickly. Or in They Don't Know How to Fall in Place, an almost existentialist love song, joyful and vital music, lyrics about the impossibility of finding one's place in the world, which is a key theme of the album. Existentialism returns in the title track, which has such old-fashioned timbres that it is kitsch and exhilarating at the same time. But then, tell me another group that may ask themselves “was I born in vain?” with the grace of one If You and I Are Not Wise.
Not that the lyrics are rock literary. The pinnacle of virtuosity is the Beatles-like game that transforms “ring goes the bell” into “Ringo's the bell”. Here there is no need for a Dylan or a Cohen because D'Addario have everything else, they know how to compose and therefore they are totally out of context in the pop of this era of songs to be pinned on TikTok. They manage to keep together the pre rock'n'roll craftsmanship, when the 45s were assembled in assembly lines like the Brill Building, and the libertarian spirit of the 60s groups, staying away from the blues matrix from which so much rock and is replaced by a sentimental streak. They produce, mix, play almost everything themselves, electric, acoustic, 12-string guitars, mandolin, bass, drums, keyboards of all kinds. There is just Sean Lennon on bass and production in a love song that is very 50s, a string quartet, very few other musicians. The result is a record that, with its bittersweet lyrics and euphoric music, the light-hearted tone and the desire to escape, makes you smile and also a little saddened by what you've lost and what you'll never experience.
Now, there is revivalist and revivalist. Greta Van Fleet shamelessly copies the atmospheres, the sounds, even the reverberations of Led Zeppelin records. Well done, they're good, but how can you fully love songs from what isn't a tribute band just for the autograph repertoire? Måneskin have become one of the best known rock bands in the world with a mix that is decidedly less shameless derivative than that of Greta Van Fleet, but how can you fully love songs without the magnificent craftsmanship, from the knowledge of the history of rock , of the spirit from contrarian of the greats?
D'Addario are musicians of a completely different breed, they are at another level. I'm not a cosplayer. They say they do things by instinct, not by calculation. And yet at times they give the sensation of roaming free and unconscious in a no man's land that lies somewhere between homage, inheritance, forgery and retromania. This last word they don't use and actually said a year ago to Rolling who don't even know who Simon Reynolds is. They evidently prefer guitars to cultural debates and they are probably right that they manage to put into their songs both the lost lightness and the melodic-harmonic constructions which in the 1960s made pop take a big step forward and which have been lost (harmony , this unknown). Maybe they don't get to write pocket symphonies, but that's the idea. As Weyes Blood, who finds them courageous, says, “they try to create great songs in a world where it is taken for granted that all the great songs have already been written.” It's not a feat, it's an impossible mission.
Nostalgia in Lemon Twigs' music is implicit in the idealization of an era they did not experience and can reconstruct at will. A Dream Is All We Know it contains one strong piece after another, you put it on and you want to listen to it again Band on the Run, #1 Records, Pet Sounds, Something/Anything?, Younger Than Yesterday, the Beatles' red album, things like that. But it is a comforting dream. It says something about who we are and the world we live in, our fears and our demons, and that something is: let's escape to a happier time. Indeed, with a little imagination one might say that the subtle melancholy that runs through their songs, even the happiest ones, comes from the conviction of being born in the wrong era. Disguised as retro-rockers, they stage the anxieties and fears of their peers, the feeling that there is no future, a general feeling today. But then they say that the only way to survive this brutal and mediocre era is to fantasize about another one, and it's a bit like giving up. But it's a magnificent rendition A Dream Is All We Know.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
