The Lemon Twigs | A Dream Is All We Know | Captured Tracks | May 2024
In the 2000 film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Rob Gordon opines about the role that pop records have played in his life: “Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery, and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” Brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario grew up on the old stuff, the ’60s, and ’70s, when pop was the playground of lunatics desperate to untangle their knotted psyches to a captive audience in an easily digestible format. And since their days as a cover band, The Lemon Twigs have shown how ravenously they’ve fed on the golden oldies. Their fifth studio album, A Dream Is All We Know, doesn’t stray far from the retro aesthetic quick-change of their earlier records, but the tragic, deconstructionist theming and further tightened songcraft and sequencing make it the Twigs’ most addictive and compelling album to date.
If there’s any criticism you’ll hear consistently levied against The Lemon Twigs, it’s that they’re “pastiche.” You could even call them a cosplay band, and it would ring a little true. Return to “The One”: Squeeze goes glam ala Sweet. Everything Harmony can be broken down almost track-by-track by primary influence: “When Winter Comes Around” is Simon & Garfunkel, “Any Time of Day” is Bee Gees, “What You Were Doing” is Big Star, “What Happens to a Heart” is Squeeze again but swap the sugary, wailing guitars for the grand orchestral arrangements of early Scott Walker, etc. It’s an accurate summation but not necessarily a fair one because what gets lost among all the masks is that The Lemon Twigs aren’t simply a band with an identity crisis: they’re a band about an identity crisis. The Lemon Twigs nestle their thesis as a seamless vocal harmony within the Beatles-esque Merseybeat bopper “Peppermint Roses”: “Who am I supposed to be / Myself or me / And how can I pretend to be that?” The D’Addarios are impressionable, as so many of us are. If you buy into Myers-Briggs, their prodigious, sponge-like ability to transform into their various favorites would heavily imply INFP. But then you have to reckon with the strong possibility that your identity is just an amalgamation of the people and things that have happened to you. There’s no core personality, only personas. You define yourself via the external, and when the external disappears, literally or figuratively, so do you. It’s a terrifying prospect.
And A Dream Is All We Know is a terrifying, deeply sad record masquerading as sunshine pop, a jukebox musical of never-was radio hits, discouraged BPD crammed into record grooves. Lead single and opener “My Golden Years” is an immaculate up-tempo jangler where the boys know when to lilt, stretch, growl, or coo their vocals. It’s perhaps the closest to pure audio euphoria you’ll hear in 2024, and yet its whole conceit is wasting time out of fear, time that you’ll never get back, and only genuinely understanding how you’d live your “best” years better once they’ve passed you by. It’s not a unique premise, but the framing is unorthodox: it’s the blinding holy gateway to further gorgeous despair. “They Don’t Know How to Fall in Place” is part Monkees, part Left Banke, part Tages, but never quite any of them. The Twigs wrap the song around this quietly anxious key chord progression: the melody is almost needlessly complex for a pop song until it clicks as a reflection of overthought. The music itself never entirely falls in place as the Twigs sing of dissociation (“Every day is like a memory of / Someone I knew a thousand years ago I’ve never heard or seen”), describing bouts of insomnia in abstract terms and resigning to social isolation. It’s “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” jacked up on stimulants, trying to convince you it’s not going to fall apart.
Pet Sounds is an appropriate comparison to make overall. A Dream Is All We Know is aesthetically more scattered than the weeping baroque melancholia of that classic – in fact, it more regularly pilfers from The Beach Boys’ pre-Pet Sounds period when it comes to pure sonics – but thematically, it’s so similar. Even the love songs aren’t really love songs: hell, it’s difficult to tell if “Church Bells” is even about a person. The sparsely-written track (which does build into quite the brass and string arrangement towards its end) seems to be about pining for a woman on the other side of a riverbank at first, but the Jersey/Mersey angle throws it into question. I start to think of it in terms of the band’s admirable but potentially futile quest to make respected modern “classic” pop music, this fear that the goal is waiting, but they’ll never cross the river due to time, geography, and other factors they can’t control. “In the Eyes of the Girl” and “How Can I Love Her More?” are more obviously romantic but steeped in unhealthy attachments. The former, a bullseye shot at a Brian Wilson-style crooned ballad, makes a point to present the narrator as having no self-worth outside of the girl’s gaze. And narratives like these, back in the ’60s, we chalk up to hyperbole. But they take on a new life today. “How Can I Love Her More?” might sound sweet with all its falsetto peaks and sunny trumpets, but it’s paranoid and clingy. The narrator sobs when the girl is gone; he’s constantly wondering what she’s thinking and if he’s doing enough. When the “say a bad thing about our love” bridge kicks in, it sounds less like a dare and more like a plea.
And yet none of this is as devastating as “If You and I Are Not Wise.” The Twigs slap on Byrds outfits for the beautifully despondent tune, vocals are woefully detached and exhausted, effectively steamrolled by the “thin disguise” of the scratchy, twanging guitar chimes. The brothers sing that they feel disconnected from their souls, that it gets worse yearly, that they feel empty and can’t grasp the purpose of their births. It’s a cry for help they can’t help but musically obfuscate: no song has made me weep harder this year.
Just like with Everything Harmony, you can classify almost all of these tracks by what they seem to be pretending to be: “Ember Days” revisits Simon & Garfunkel, the earthy, lowkey folk harmonies of “I Should’ve Known Right From the Start” recall Neil Young’s acoustic material before transitioning into the rollicking power pop closer “Rock On (Over and Over),” which would feel right at home tacked onto Dwight Twilley Band’s Sincerely. And it’s a strange thing to sell you that this is not a problem, but precisely why a record is so fucking incredible. We prize originality in art. Pastiche is a dirty word. But what makes The Lemon Twigs, and by extension A Dream Is All We Know, so endlessly fascinating is how they wield pastiche with great thematic purpose. Their love for a past they’ve never experienced is obsessive, and the attention to detail is borderline ridiculous. It goes far beyond what Wolfmother, Jet, and The Darkness did with Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Queen, respectively. The music videos, the vintage gear and recording techniques, the adoration for the classic pop bridge, and the in-and-out scaled harmony are all difficult as hell. It’s also expensive: Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk comes to mind as another big, ambitious throwback pop record during a time when it’s expressly anti-zeitgeist. They make this music this way because they have to: they can’t not play stylistic hopscotch because they soak up all the sounds and people they encounter, hyperfocus, and then move on.
It’s not retroist pandering; it’s an inescapable loop. “Rock On (Over and Over),” like most of the album, is impressionist but solidifies within context: it’s about this loop. “We need to find a way out,” they sing on the bridge, but as the outro fades, they’re still rocking on, over and over, forever and ever, trapped by habit. Selfishly, the D’Addarios are too gifted at songwriting for me to take any issue with this loop, too sneakily self-aware and still entirely earnest for me not to take some sick joy in wallowing along with them in their conflicted love, their impostor syndrome, their sense of unreality. Do I listen to The Lemon Twigs because I’m miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to The Lemon Twigs? It’s such a good question that the answer doesn’t matter. There’s no beginning and no end, only the loop.
Note: This review was originally published in Rantipole.
Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, The Bulb Region, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, and others.
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