The Lemon Twigs

The Lemon Twigs with The Umbrellas

Following the release of Everything Harmony, which garnered acclaim from Questlove, Iggy Pop, Anthony Fantano, The Guardian, and countless others, The Lemon Twigs--the New York City rock band fronted by brothers Brian and Michael D'Addario--have once again captured the attention of the music listening public. They are in their premature "comeback" stage, and coming back this early has its benefits; the brothers have the energy of 24- and 26- year-olds, plus the experience and songwriting chops of seasoned musicians, having recorded their first album, Do Hollywood, nearly a decade ago at ages 15 and 17.

Set for release less than a year after their last album, A Dream Is All We Know is a joyous affair. As the title suggests, it's less of a sober look at the darker side of life, and more a hopeful sojourn into the realm of dreams. The tone has shifted away from dreary melancholic ballads and moody power pop. Brian and Michael are revisiting their "1968" sound. This album feels closely related to Do Hollywood, but their songwriting and recording techniques have vastly improved over the course of five albums.

The brothers combine elements of the Merseybeat sound, the California Beach Boy harmony sound, and Bubblegum to create a unique collection of pop nuggets. (They say it's part of a new "Merseybeach" movement, sure to catch on, though that fact remains to be seen.)

The sense of urgency imbued in lead single "My Golden Years" comes in part from the jangly 12-string guitars and driving drums, but also from the anxiety of a narrator who can feel their "golden years" slipping away from them. Michael's line, "In time I hope that I can show all the world the love in my mind," can serve as a statement of intent for the whole collection of songs, as the brothers race against time to create as much quality pop material as possible.

"They Don't Know How To Fall In Place" propels the album forward into bubblegum paradise with its euphoric harmonies and biting clavinet, while the Roy Wood inspired "Church Bells" takes you on a journey in its two-minute and nine-second run time. At every turn you're introduced to a new instrument, and as Michael sings "ring goes the bell," the drummer switches to the bell of the ride cymbal and the song reveals itself as a pop tone poem, complete with cellos, mandolin and trumpets, all played by Brian. Not to mention the fun Mersey pun, using famous drummer Ringo's name in a song that conflates images of the west side of Manhattan with the atmosphere of northern England. Next comes the titular "A Dream Is All I Know," an existential space age epic, followed by the baroque pocket-prog of "Sweet Vibration."

Equipped with the songwriting chops of a lost era (somewhere between The Brill Building and 10452 Bellagio Road) the new record was carefully arranged and produced entirely analog in the brothers' Brooklyn recording studio. Most of the tracks were constructed with the two brothers swapping instruments and layering all the parts themselves. One of the exceptions to that rule was "In The Eyes Of The Girl," co-produced by Sean Ono Lennon in his upstate New York studio, which had the brothers tracking drums and piano while Lennon handled bass duties. On top of that, the brothers add multilayered harmonies that bring to mind The Beach Boys, The Four Freshman, and The Free Design."

Side two's opener "If You And I Are Not Wise," has the brothers channeling the Everlys' close harmonies while seeking spiritual illumination with the line, "I wish that someone could tell me what my soul knows that I don't know." Brother Brian says, "There's definitely an escapist bend to this album. Joyous music can take you out of the world when things get too heavy, which everyone needs sometimes. "

"How Can I Love Her More?" is a whirlwind of musical flights of fancy. Blaring horns and strings set the stage before the song settles into a rollicking shuffle, complete with two drum sets, an adventurous bass part, theremin, flutes and harpsichord. It's a kitchen sink approach, full of left turns, but never bordering on cacophony. It segues directly into the peaceful, sparser "Ember Days," propelled by a meditative nylon string pattern that's part bossa nova, part Nick Drake. The peace doesn't last long though, as "Peppermint Roses" erupts with a menacing Farfisa into a two-part nightmare comedy that doesn't let up. The album unwinds with the dreamy "I Should've Known Right From The Start." It's like a forgotten piece of French Pop that just happens to be sung in English, complete with arpeggiated acoustic guitar, melodic bass and catchy drum hooks.

While the album is chock full of progressive pop ideas, it closes with an ode to early rock and roll on"Rock On (Over and Over)." "Rock On" contextualizes the band as part of a lineage of rock and roll that's never really stopped. In every decade there have been bands that have put their own spin on the music and "push(ed) it on down to the line." But none have done it with the attention to detail and raw talent of these brothers. For The Lemon Twigs, it took almost a decade for critics and audiences alike to present them with the major accolades they've earned this past year. While their initial records were appreciated for the musical proficiency they displayed, the brothers' past few records have communicated their ideas with more clarity and emotional resonance. In other words, "It took too long to say 'rock on.'"

~~~

The Umbrellas are four renegade romantics crafting irresistible indie pop hymns. The band's self-titled 2021 debut album became a breakout moment, winning critical praise and sparking an international tour. Follow-up LP 'Fairweather Friend' goes a step further - absorbing the sonic attack of their live shows, it balances this with studio finesse, allowing the San Francisco four-piece to become the band they've always aspired to be.

It's a record overflowing with highlights. The candyfloss melodies of introductory track 'Three Cheers!' are matched to an impactful percussive punch; 'Say What You Mean' finds The Umbrellas working with total confidence, letting the song ride out to its chiming conclusion, four voices working in precision. 'When You Find Out' offers rotating notes of guitar punctuated by a vocal that pushes past angst to accept a world full of hope. A lean 10 track affair, it grasps towards beatific pop while fuelled by a sense of risk, and the precision that comes from long months on the road.

The Umbrellas coalesced around a group of musicians who would frequent legendary San Francisco record emporium Amoeba Music. Singer and guitarist Matt Ferrera links with bassist Nick Oka, while Keith Frerichs is the powerhouse drummer. A chance encounter with Morgan Stanley singing karaoke at a Fourth of July party cemented the line-up around an avowed thirst for melody. "All of us love really earnest pop songs," Nick points out. "I guess we got to a point in our lives where we wanted to be genuine."

Playing shows at San Francisco's vital DIY redoubt Hit Gallery, The Umbrellas would share line-ups with local heroes such as April Magazine and Cindy. Recording their debut album across a two-day spell at Matt's parents' house, the results won a devoted cult following. Yet the experience of touring bonded them tightly and allowed the volume to tick up a little higher, and higher, and higher. "I think we got tired of people saying, oh you're so much louder than I thought you'd be!" laughs Matt. "Our early recordings are sweet and earnest... and we wanted it to be louder."

Kicking off sessions in November 2022, the band used an ad hoc space Matt created in his basement, working across a four-month period. Sessions were a little more relaxed in terms of timescale than their debut, but The Umbrellas were incredibly focussed on the project. "We gave ourselves more space for this album," says Keith. "We wanted time to sit on the songs, and really work on them."

Allowing their live dynamic to bleed out on tape, The Umbrellas are at once more physical and yet also more controlled on their new album. Take opening track 'Three Cheers!' - the peppy, sun-soaked rush masks a barbed lyric, courtesy of Nick Oka. "It's a pseudo-political song about power struggles that occur in a job situation, or a friend group. It's an observational song."

'Toe The Line' has an unkempt, rollicking sense of energy, the playful relationship analogy of the lyric pushed to the speed of light by Keith's ultra-fast punk drumming. 'When You Find Out' meanwhile epitomises their unified, egalitarian way of making music - with The Umbrellas, each voice counts. "It sounds different from any song we've ever written together," says Morgan. "It shows how much we've grown. Trust helps us to build the songs. It's definitely a team effort."

It's also a record of ambition. 'Say What You Mean' stretches past the four-minute mark, the viola performance informed by Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt. 'Gone' was the first song attempted for the new album, and the last they actually finished, endless re-writes transforming it into a manifesto of control and release. Taken as a whole 'Fairweather Friend' is a bold indie pop triumph, crafted with purpose and attention. Taking their time over each note, the four-piece have strengthened their songwriting, adding depth and assurance while unlocking their potential. Some bonds last a lifetime - The Umbrellas are ready to capture your heart.


~~~~~~~~

More about The Lemon Twigs

Do Hollywood, The Lemon Twigs' 2016 debut LP, was an invigorating, much-needed blast of fresh air that whipped across the arid landscape of contemporary rock. If that stunningly accomplished recording, which flew in the face of current musical trends, wasn't surprising enough on the face of it, the fact that Do Hollywood was the handiwork of two teenagers--brothers Brian and Michael D'Addario--rendered the achievement utterly mind-boggling. Now, with the follow-up full-length, Go to School (4AD, Aug. 24), the siblings, now 21 and 19, respectively, have set the bar dizzyingly high even by their own lofty standards, and proceed to soar over it into the stratosphere. Listening to this wildly ambitious album is like entering and inhabiting a parallel universe.  

Go to School's subtitle is A Musical, and that turns out to be an accurate description of the 15-song extravaganza, which tells the tale of the pure-of-heart chimpanzee Shane, who's adopted by a childless couple--played by the brothers' musical hero Todd Rundgren and their mom, Susan Hall--and raised as a human boy. Michael describes Go to School as "a fairy tale with a dark edge," as Shane is ostracized, bullied and rejected by the girl he falls for, erupts in an extreme act of retribution for being robbed of his innocence. The libretto is played out in a series of intricate, wildly eclectic musical settings ranging from spot-on throwback rockers to traditional Broadway-style production numbers.      

"We had enough songs to work on a straight-pop, more obviously autobiographical album--which didn't feel like much of a risk--or this one," Brian says of the decision-making that set them off in this envelope-ripping direction. "These [Go to School] songs come from the same place our autobiographical songs come from, so we decided to trust our instincts and to really commit to making it a musical."

Michael continues the thought. "We weren't gonna do it half-assed--we were gonna do it full-on and not shy away from the concept," he says. "For me, it felt completely like the obvious thing to do, which sounds ridiculous, but everything about it is more advanced to me, and further along. What I think would be really disappointing for our most dedicated fans is if we just did a straight-pop album next."

For Brian and Michael, working in the musical-theater mode wasn't that big a stretch, because both had been child actors. Along with the brothers' roles in TV series, Brian had appeared in a Broadway production of The Little Mermaid, while Michael performed in Coast of Utopia and All My Sons. "We were literally raised on Broadway," is how Michael puts it. 

When the brothers are working on a project, they typically immerse themselves in a handful of albums as a trigger for inspiration. In this instance, they were listening to Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma and The King and I, as well as Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Assassins. 
"Our mom introduced us to Assassins when we were kids," Brian recalls, "and me and Michael would do all the different parts with the different characters in the car. We didn't understand certain parts of the plot, but we knew all the words. I hadn't heard it for years, but when we were doing this project, I rediscovered it. At that point I'd gotten kind of numb to a lot of rock music, and I was ripe for emotionally connecting to musicals. So I felt like that was where I was meant to be."

"With any musical, you've gotta first believe that people breaking into song every five minutes is normal--there are no rules," Michael says of the cosmology of musical theater. "There's no reason why nobody realizes that Shane is not a human. They just know he's a little bit different. You don't ask, 'Well, does he not have a mirror?' That doesn't matter. You've gotta believe it in order to enjoy the music and absorb the weight of the lyrics. The 'why' is just because it gets you to the next part. It's supposed to make you feel something." 

They recorded Go to School at the dedicated analog studio they'd installed in the Long Island home they shared with their parents. They used a chunk of the advance to upgrade their gear, picking up a vintage 24-track console and two-inch tape machine, and another chunk for orchestral sessions encompassing strings, horns and woodwinds. Brian composed the arrangements and conducted the musicians, while Michael manned the console.

"'Born Wrong/Heart Song' is where we went full musical," says Brian. "We decided that we weren't going to put any drums or guitars on it and just have it all be orchestral instruments. I've always been a firm believer that production is everything, and arrangement is everything, and the song is variable depending on how you arrange it."     

At the other extreme, Rundgren appears on "Rock Dreams" and takes the lead on the swelling ballad "Never Know," which puts the legend in his early-'70s sweet spot. "It helped that 'Never Know' was something that was natural for Todd to sing, although I didn't write it with the intention of him singing it," Brian points out. "We'd just performed with Todd at Coachella [in 2017], which we figured would probably be the one thing that we ever did with him. And then we were like, 'It'd be great to get him on the record somehow.' And it ended up working out in this fortuitous way, where it was really easy to fit the pieces together." 

Big Star's Jody Stephens, another musical hero, drums on "Student Becomes the Teacher," while Michael--who'd been obsessively dissecting the iconic Big Star albums--channels Alex Chilton on "Queen of My School," an uncannily detailed homage to the great Memphis band circa Radio City. But the song is more than a musical homage, as Michael explains. "In 'Queen of My School,' I like the idea of the nerd and the most popular girl getting together. I wasn't a nerd, I guess, but I don't think anybody wanted to date us. Because we were into music and not sports, it was kinda like nobody looked at us as cool."

In fleshing out the characters, the brothers decided none of them should be completely good or evil. Says Brian, "In 'The Bully,' you get the bully's perspective: The father has a PhD and his son is slow, so he resents his son. And his wife died in childbirth, so he blames his son for her death. Then you even understand the bully's father, because he had to deal with this horrific thing. And Shane's parents sort of blame the kid for their lost dreams, and you see why that's sad. The whole time we were growing up, my mom always said, 'I feel like you could really love everybody if you knew enough about them and understood where they were coming from.' 

Brian got through middle school and high school in what he describes as "a comfortable sort of isolation," adding, "I knew it was probably better to separate myself then become corrupted in some way. And that's a big part of what the record's about."

"When I was going to school," Michael remembers, "there was so much negativity and so many ignorant people that I'm kind of surprised that I was able to keep it away from me to the extent that I did. So, in that sense, I felt like Shane, and I think we got that angle from our own experiences."  
Michael wrote the climactic song "The Fire" early in the process, and that gave the brothers a clearer sense of the narrative trajectory as well as its relevance. "It was an important subject that hasn't been touched on," Michael explains. "And it's so prevalent in the modern world that it needs to have a presence in art."

When asked if the brothers had topicality in mind when they were concocting the narrative, Brian offers an unsettling response. "We had an uncomfortable realization after we'd finished the record that [school violence] has always been a reality for us," he says. "I mean, Columbine happened in 1999, the year Michael was born. It's so commonplace that we wouldn't even question the idea of Shane burning the school down and a hundred people dying. So it didn't even feel topical to us, because it's something we've always known."

It's hardly unusual for artists to gain greater perspective about their work after they've completed it, and that was true for the authors of Go to School. "Initially, we thought it would be more dramatic if Shane really intended to hurt people," Brian explains. "But now, the way I think of it is that he obviously intends to set fire to the school, but it gets out of hand really quickly, and he doesn't necessarily realize that it's going to do what it does. So it's definitely supposed to be destructive, but his intention is open to interpretation."

"Everything that the story's about would seem frivolous and pointless if there's no message," Michael asserts. "Shane is put in a situation where everything around him is negative, and there are so many evil forces that he has to keep it out of his mind and see if he can stay spiritually sound, and eventually he breaks. If you're growing up in a house or working in a place where people around you are depressed and negative and cynical, is there any way to shield yourself from that and keep your soul intact without just running away?" 

Brian has his own feeling about the nature of the message. "People are so reactionary these days," he reflects, "and it's really easy for people to look at something that someone did and go, 'They're a terrible person'; there's some sort of sick joy in that. And that's another big part of this record--that to really feel love and empathy, you have to have an understanding of what people go through. And I think it makes the most sense to get the message across in a metaphorical way--because if you talk about it in the wrong way, then you're going down a one-way street to the wrong side of history."
In creating Go to School, The Lemon Twigs have taken on an immense, multileveled challenge and pulled it off with a degree of insightfulness and sophistication far beyond their years. The challenge now falls on listeners to willingly suspend their disbelief and join Brian and Michael D'Addario on this unprecedented musical fantasia, which takes us to the heart and soul of present-day reality.