Lemonade – Lemonade
‘Sweet & Sour’
What Lemonade lack in track number, they compensate for in length. Their six tracks together weigh in well over the half-hour mark and encompass upbeat electronica, acid house, punk-funk and flourishes of dub and even Arabic melody.
Hailing from San Francisco, now resident in Brooklyn, the trio combine their many influences with the ADD aplomb of fellow Californians Abe Vigoda. Whereas their sound is suited to the scuzzy punk of LA’s Club Smell, Lemonade are altogether more refined and destined to remain in upper East coast, loft-party reverence.
The indifferent opener is a 303-laden party-starter, suitable for discerning, cowbell-loving dance-floors. Beset with garbled vocal-FX, it would have been best merged into the lolloping bass frequencies of ‘Unreal’, a reverb-heavy, tribal-trance number similar to John Lydon’s experiments with Leftfield. ‘Nasifon’ brings some (snake) charm to the mix, coquettishly looping round tribal rhythms and house beats.
The urban shout of ‘Real Slime’ is abrasively oiksome but mercifully short, whilst ‘Sunchips’ is not at all for the shy and retiring, reprising and embellishing the speaker-shaking dub of ‘Unreal’, pairing it with a haunting keyboard refrain and Lydon-like warbling. The closing, pseudo-ambience of ‘Bliss Out’ thunders like The Prodigy once did, giving way to a twinkling sample and dreamy vocals professing that “we’re all having a good time”.
Lemonade are less a question of lemons and more a question of tea and cups thereof. They have enough substance to garner more than just scenester support, but too much variety to tie them to a particular demographic. Sufficiently sweet, yet part sour: true lemonade indeed.