Revisiting The Lemonheads' 'Car Button Cloth.'

Photo by: Michel Van Collenburg

I was listening to the expanded reissue of The Lemonheads' Car Button Cloth earlier today. When it originally came out, I was buzzing along with most other folks about the hefty one-two punch of It's A Shame About Ray and Come On Feel The Lemonheads coming out in quick succession in 1993 and 1994. So in 1996, Car Button Cloth was met with great anticipation as we expected another collection of lead Lemonhead Evan Dando's honeyed mixture of power-pop melodies with an indie rock sensibility and an uncanny, unerring ear for a hook. Instead, Car Button Cloth was an album taking a more fractured approach to pop, and back in the day, that album really did occasionally feel like you were experiencing Dando's mental degradation and disassociation in real time.

But here we are, almost 30 years later, and in the grand timeline/story of The Lemonheads Car Button Cloth not only deserves a second chance, I believe it's at times knife-edge emotional uncertainty feels like an artistic statement from the subconscious, no matter what shape Dando was actually in when recording.

The original album certainly seems less "off-balance" to my older ears than it did to my youthful ones. However, this would have been back in a time when I was DJing a lot and would often focus on the tracks I thought would work in a set, so I give myself a slight pass for not immediately recognizing some of the gems within its running order upon its inital release. On that basis alone, I would urge you to give this a spin (or another spin, if you also haven't returned to this album in decades).

If you're gonna pick up the album, in this instance I do recommend the expanded version since the bonus tracks here are varied and entertaining and go beyond the usual “here’s an acoustic demo or two” that afflicts most other reissues of this ilk. In other words, in the parlance we used to employ back in the day when you needed a review to know whether an album was worth your hard-earned dough to hear anything else inside of it beyond the radio singles, it’s worth it.