The Lemonheads fall short of potential

The Lemonheads

Car Button Cloth

Evan Dando probably thinks he's the new Syd Barrett: the drug-addled Holy Fool whose seemingly random mutterings conceal a wealth of wisdom and experience. But Syd has two advantages over Evan: one, his brand of paranoid psychedelia is much more suited to lyrical experimentation than Dando's straight-ahead power-pop, which tends to favor direct expression over hidden meaning; and two, Barrett never wrote a line as stupid as "Sorry `bout dropping that lude/It just seemed like the best thing to do."

That memorable couplet comes from the first track, "It's All True," on the Lemonheads' new album Car Button Cloth. Over 10 years and 15-plus lineup changes only Dando has been the constant, and with the departure of founding member Ben Deily just prior to their 1990 major-label debut, the Lemonheads have become entirely Dando's band.

In some sense, then, Car Button Cloth represents a new start: whereas previous albums usually had one or two members carried over from past lineups, this version - consisting of Dando, bassists Bill Gibson and Dina Waxman, drummer Patrick Murphy (formerly of Dinosaur Jr.), and guitarist Kenny Lyon - is entirely new. Having stood on the brink of superstardom with 1992's excellent It's a Shame About Ray, the Lemonheads couldn't follow it up, and 1993's Come on Feel the Lemonheads was a tossed-off, half-assed effort, and quickly dropped off the charts. Disappointment with the album, combined with Dando's pretty-boy looks and spaced-out demeanor led to a backlash against the group and its leader, and Dando became something of a joke, surfacing recently as a friend and follower of Oasis's Noel Gallagher.

So while Car Button Cloth is an overall good album, it's not really good enough; it might have worked as a follow-up to It's a Shame About Ray, but it's just too slight to erase Come on Feel from the popular memory. The main problems that Dando seems to suffer from are simply laziness and self-indulgence, an often fatal combination. He's hardly without talent, but too often you get the sense that he's writing down the first thing that comes into his head without really thinking about what he's saying.

Dando's instinct for terrific pop melodies carries "It's All True" over some rough lyrical spots, but it's not enough to salvage a song like "Hospital" which, with the lines "There's a disease goin' `round the hospital/Green green leaves fallin' from the trees" ends up just being dumb.

And while the album's collaborations with high-profile critically-acclaimed artists Eugene Kelley (of the Vaselines and Eugenius) and Epic Soundtracks make for slightly above-average songs, nothing on the album compares to "The Outdoor Type," about a guy who's lied about his love for nature to impress his girlfriend. The highly-publicized collaboration with Noel Gallagher, "Purple Parallelagram," was pulled from the album at the last minute, apparently because Noel was embarrassed by it.

Funny, catchy, and clever, with lines like "I can't go away with you on a rock-climbing weekend/What if something's on TV and it's never shown again," "The Outdoor Type" is exactly the kind of song that Dando can't seem to bring himself to write: one that makes sense and seems thought-out. The song, one of only two on the album not written in whole or part by Dando, was written by Dando's former songwriting partner Tom Morgan.

Car Button Cloth isn't without its moments: the seemingly self-criticizing "Losing Your Mind," possibly about Dando's infamous drug abuse, or the bouncy, rocking "One More Time," where the simple longing in the words "One more time, baby, one more time/You're thinking of me, baby, one more time" say more than any amount of verse about `ludes and leaves ever could.

But there's too much junk cluttering up the album, from the tossed off "6ix" (inspired by the film "Seven") to the five-and-a-half minute guitar jam "Secular Rockulidge" that closes out the record. Which is too bad, because despite his penchant for acting stupid in public, Evan Dando is talented and, on record at least, likable. But it's becoming clear that for whatever reason, he'll never write a song as touching as Ray's "My Drug Buddy," or as driving as "Rudderless" (the riff which he rips off for Car Button Cloth's "Break Me," to little success). And while, sure, he's catchy, there's a ton of smarter bands out there, from fellow Bostonians Buffalo Tom to Cracker to Fiendz, who are just as catchy, and certainly more consistent.

It's not over for the Lemonheads yet; Dando could pull himself together and maybe knock out another great album. But it's beginning to look more and more like he won't, that he'll stick to the formula he seems to have fallen into, and keep making pleasant pop albums that don't really go anywhere or do anything new. Car Button Cloth is a pretty good album, and makes for decent background music. Given the current market, though, and the odds against him, "pretty good," for Evan Dando, just isn't enough.