What if the D’Addario brothers had surprisingly pulled a rabbit out of the hat?
Now on their fifth studio album, Michael and Brian may have made the leap in quality that many fans were waiting for from at least a couple of their productions.
“A Dream Is All We Know” is the title of the new project with which the two New Yorkers continue the operation aimed at expressing their personal version of what characterized the ’60s and ’70s decades.
Much more than on previous occasions, the Lemon Twigs provide, through the twelve songs in the setlist, a plausible interpretation of their world built between beat, psychedelia, folk, surf and glam-rock, giving conscious flashes of modernity, but without distorting minimally the atavistic roots.
An evident artistic growth emerges between the grooves, which had already partially made inroads into the melancholy soft-rock of the predecessor “Everything Harmony”. To further chisel so much artistic construction, a specific vein comes in support songwriting, which crafts the accurate melodic structure in abundance. Those periodic pauses which, in almost all previous works, had generated some dangerous moments of monotony seem to have disappeared.
This time, the menu proposed by Michael and Brian includes thirty minutes of pure fun, which started off like a rocket with “My Golden Years”, suspended between Beach Boys and Kinks, with some references to the Los Angeles Rembrandts and Supergrass of the beginning.
In continuity with theopener, the same sensations emerge from “Sweet Vibration”, “They Don’t Know How To Fall In Place” and “If You And I Are Not Wise”, where the milestone shadow of the Byrds emerges with vigorous insistence, while “How Can I Love Her More?” seems more in tune with the surf-psychedelic channel branded by Brian Wilson & Co.
If “Church Bells” gives the Fab4 the right ticket, so be it title trackwhich “Ember Days”, set aside with certain intentions on the typical ballads wing Paul McCartney, with some spice also derived from that wizard Todd Rundgren.
The psych-beat shoots of “Peppermint Roses” (a bit like early Coral) and the suspicious, as well as excellent, acoustics of “I Should’ve Known Right From The Start”, accompany the glam/rock’n’-tinged closing roll of “Rock On (Over and Over),” a tasty shape-shifting passage placed between Chuck Berry and Marc Bolan.
It’s true, the long sequence of sacred monsters revealed in the previous lines could lead us to rate “A Dream Is All We Know” as too derivative and therefore negligible.
Far from wishing to accredit to this LP the unlikely standards of standard bearer of a musical scene that has already expressed its maximum in the periods of competence, it would, however, be too snobbish an action not to admit that the D’Addario brothers were able to sink masterfully the coup in a revivalist territory, which many are currently probing in disguise (and questionable results), a place underestimated by most, which hides too many pitfalls if approached with little attention and insufficient respect.
Fresh, sunny songs, perfect for listening during a bright late spring day. In a period where synth-pop, post-punk, R&B, Rap/Hip-Hop and the like are the undisputed masters, the Lemon Twigs respond to others without throwing any punch in the stomach, but with docile and eternal gestures: a caress and a sly smile full of colors and essences.
05/09/2024
