The Lemonheads
Love Chant
FIRE
I’m not entirely certain that the world was clamoring for a new album from The Lemonheads, let alone a memoir from its scruffily handsome mouthpiece, but I’m glad that both exist in 2025. Like a pretty-toned Hüsker Dü, or a noisier Big Star with a production budget, Evan Dando’s harmony-driven outfit—all circling around the lead singer’s deep, flat baritone—held down the lovelier, more melodic side of the ’90s alt continuum released across small labels (Taang! Records) and majors (Atlantic) alike. And while 1992’s It's a Shame About Ray found Dando at the peak of his bittersweet, grungy music-making prowess, Love Chant isn’t half bad or any less messily melancholic, either. In fact, it’s as if no time has passed between viewings of 120 Minutes and Generation Alpha.
Sticking to his coterie of ’90s friends and contemporaries by hosting the band’s former bassist Juliana Hatfield, J Mascis, The Real Kids’ John Felice, and The Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman as guests, Dando and his 21st century’s L-Heads (bassist Farley Glavin and drummer John Kent) find a crinkled-up pop middle ground where nostalgia meets the nowadays, and where existential ramblings (opener “58 Second Song”) connect uneasily to butt-hurt poetry (second track “Deep End”). While “In the Margin” does its thing quickly, gruffly, and with askew rhythms and barking guitars as their driving force, “Be In” is a slower, sexier churning combine where Dando’s low-voiced ramble meets a curlicue of crying guitars.
Careening doom thuds (“Togetherness Is All I’m After”), handclapped pop-tones (“Cell Phone Blues”), speed janglers (“Marauders”), and The The impersonations (“The Key of Victory”) all lead up to Dando’s grand finale, “Roky.” With its drifting guitars and ice-cold drumming, his voice lifts an octave, softens its palate, and finds its vision in a likely autobiographical rumination (or resignation) of having been stung, been lost and misunderstood, while the song itself finds its sunny spot amid the shadows. “Can it get any worse than it was / When the fever first took hold / And it led me on to the world where I don't belong?” Dando asks before answering his own sad question with just a hint of optimism: “It’s a gas, it’s a trip / And I just renewed my membership / To a club that I joined / With a casual flip of a worthless coin / And I’m stuck to the tacky floor / And I’m tired, and I’m untoward / But true, so I’ll just stay here with you.”
Though it may still be a shame about Ray, at least Dando found his way back.
