A very quick follow up to last year’s ‘Everything Harmony’, The Lemon Twigs return with yet more perfectly pleasant do-wop pop rock harmonies on ‘A Dream Is All We Know’ on Captured Track Records.
There are plenty of nods to the super sounds of the sixties and seventies. But there are nods and then there’s more nods on this album than one of those nodding toy dogs people have in their cars, but this car is driving over the speed limit on a bumpy pot-hole ridden highway.
Take your pick, Ray Davies on the Village Green Preservation Society flex on ‘My Golden Years’, Brian Wilson/Pet Sound-esque harmonies (throughout) but especially, almost to parodic effect on ‘In the Eyes of The Girl’, acid-era wonky rock The Beatles on ‘Church Bells’, Simon and Garfukel hazy folk narratives on ‘If You and I Are not Wise’ and even Status Quo guitar lines on ‘Rock On (Over and Over)’.
Having been brought up on long car journeys of that kind of music, it’s not that I don’t enjoy any of those bands, or that sound, I love it all, but in perfecting this rock and roll pastiche, in wearing their influences on their (most likely flared) sleeves, you would struggle to hear something unique on this record. It is at times like listening to a The Beach Boys tribute act, which again, I don’t hold real objection to, but brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario really double down on this retrospective and have actually created more of a complex debate around the concept of an album more than the sound it produces,
On the one hand, is it plain lazy to simply replicate the forefathers of rock and roll, and in this impatient world we live in, in the quest for the bold and new, perhaps there is no longer space for nostalgia? Or do bands tie themselves up in knots these days to the detriment of their music, striving to make something original and ‘A Dream Is All We Know’ is in fact a strangely unique offering in this era of music?
‘A Dream is All We Know’ is fun to listen to but does not bowl me over with originality. It would however probably bring tears of nostalgia down Brian Wilson’s sacred face and for that, this can and must be enjoyed and celebrated.
