It’s the age-old question: Once you’ve written a concept album about a chimpanzee who is raised and educated as a human boy, what do you do for an encore?
Well, if you’re The Lemon Twigs, you presumably have to accept the fact that you can’t make a more deliberately weird and outrageously original album than their 2018 freakfest Go To School. So you don’t even try. Instead, you just write a new batch of glammy power-pop tracks that draw upon your usual laundry list of ’70s rock influences — Elton and Iggy, Lou and Dylan, Alice and Meat, and plenty more where they came from. And you end up with Songs For The General Public, an album that’s completely and totally serviceable, but simply doesn’t and cannot reach the gloriously idiosyncratic, exuberantly vibrant heights of your previous releases. And once it’s all said and done, maybe you chalk it up as a learning experience. Or maybe, you start brainstorming a bigger and better album.
THE PRESS RELEASE: “The D’Addario brothers return with their third Lemon Twigs album, Songs For The General Public, written, recorded and self-produced at their home studio in Long Island, Sonora Studios in Los Angeles and Electric Lady in New York City. The prodigiously talented brothers first emerged as The Lemon Twigs in 2016 with their debut LP Do Hollywood, whose showstopping melodies mined from every era of rock quickly earned fans in Elton John, Questlove, and Jack Antonoff. Go To School, the ambitious 15-track coming-of-age opus, followed in 2018 and solidified the band’s reputation for building grand walls of sound around an audacious concept. Sam France of Foxygen writes, “The Twigs are legends — teen sensations, k pop stars, BrotherLovers, Twiggy Cola Lite. Their songs exist as cultural freebase. Cocaine, water, baking soda, and DNA. (o.k. ) While the White Smile Face People appoint Garage Girl, Digital Bass Face or Shitbag Boy as the new FreakoftheWeek, the Twigs have lived 26 cat lives from here to japan making real life bonafide Humans rejoice in the pagan art of Magick Pop Freebase. There are millions of fans, You see; the twigz are more Popular than You, they are Greater than Your Favorite Band, they are a phenomenon.”
