1986 was the year my passion for vinyl really took off while I was a student in Lund. At the very same time, The Lemonheads were forming in Boston. Strangely enough, our paths never really crossed. Of course, over the years I'd heard the odd song, liked what I heard and thought, I really must look into this band. Yet it has taken almost forty years for me to discover The Lemonheads via the LP Love Chant – and the first thing that struck me was just how un-American the band actually sounds. Instead, I hear echoes of British guitar pop, melodies that could just as easily have come from Manchester or Glasgow. This is an album where punk energy meets the melodic sensibility of pop and the reflective nature of folk rock in a way that feels both grand and completely natural. When the album was released in 2025, I could hear the DNA of so many bands on my very first listen. It was almost as if every track had already found its way, in one form or another, into the British and American bands from the 1980s and 1990s that fill my record shelves. The emphasis here isn't on crushing guitar riffs, but on memorable melodies and intelligent lyrics with a subtle political edge. There's a quiet confidence in the stripped-back arrangements – the songs never have to force the issue to leave their mark. I'm particularly drawn to those moments where the performance feels deliberately a little rough around the edges. It creates the impression of a spontaneous jam, an "Oops moment" that simply happens in the flow. Perhaps that's exactly why Love Chant feels every bit as relevant today as it undoubtedly would have done if it had, at least in theory, found its way onto my turntable back in the late 1980s.
The Lemonheads – Love Chant
Related Posts
Kaleidoscope – Tangerine Dream
Kaleidoscope and Tangerine Dream is a record that has been in the back of my mind since my very first tentative attempts at buying 60s LPs with psychedelic influences. It has not been uncommon for it to be labelled “the best psychedelic LP in the world”, which of course is not a reasonable claim. Music is probably the most subjective thing you can express a binary opinion about, which doesn’t exactly make you very credible. But having said that, Tangerine Dream is a gem in the context. A really good record. As with everything else, there has to be a beginning. Psychedelic records were relatively easy to come across during the first half of the 90s, when CDs meant that people were, quite literally, throwing their LPs out as landfill. Some records were perhaps kept closer to the chest, partly because of their emotional value, but also because of their reputation. Tangerine Dream was surely one of those records. Were there expensive second-hand records in 1990? Well, yes and no. If you paid 200 kronor, you could pretty much get whatever you wanted. More often than not, good second-hand LPs were available for less than fifty kronor. My personal ceiling was 200 kronor, at that price, it had to be something really special. “Why are you bothering with all that stuff? There won’t be any record players left soon.” I heard that quite often. So when I spotted a Fontana STL 5448, UK 1967, displayed on the wall at Sadisfaction in Haga, I thought: this one is coming home with me. The LP was high up, on the top row, right next to the counter on the right-hand side, looking into the shop. Martin was standing behind the counter with Tore, both busy dealing with customers, and the shop was packed that Saturday. The price was 500 kronor. 500 kronor. That was a lot of money back then. But it was also something I had been looking for, and I thought: fuck it, this one isn’t going to come around again. Since I didn’t want to interrupt Martin or Tore, and because 500 kronor was a considerable amount of money at the time, not something you paid for an LP every day – I took a slimm risk that someone else might grab it. So I crossed the road to withdraw one sixth of my monthly student loan from the cash machine. Five minutes later, at most, I was back in the shop with the cash. Cards were hardly ever used back then, and certainly not in a second-hand record shop. The space on the wall where the record had been was conspicuously empty. I scanned the shop and, to my horror, saw a man perhaps 35 years older than me, at least in my eyes, handing Martin a five-hundred-kronor note, with the LP tucked under his arm. You get the picture. A purchase I never made, and one I can’t really regret. But I do regret not interrupting Martin and asking him to put the LP aside for me. Tangerine Dream UK 1967 remained a dream.
Read More
Arthur Lee - Vindicator
I’ve talked about Arthur Lee before. He is probably one of the artists I’ve listened to most, perhaps with the exception of David Bowie – who knows. Most of Arthur Lee’s LPs have come to me in a steady stream, without too much effort. I started collecting these LOVE LPs more than 30 years ago. Some, such as Forever Changes, I have in several different editions – US, UK mono and stereo, etc. One album I did have to actively search for, though, was Arthur Lee’s Vindicator from 1972. Since finally finding a good copy, I’ve actually come across it more and more often. A rainy and granite-grey day in November 2007 in Oxford. Avid Records on Gloucester Street, just a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, was a real institution. Three floors packed with more records than could reasonably have fitted inside. Of course, I had rummaged around there before and asked the same question: “Any chance you’ve got a decent copy of Vindicator? This time the place looked even shabbier than I remembered. Garry, with a cup of tea in his hand, said, “I’ll have a look,” and headed upstairs. And then he came back with it. Mint condition. £25. Far too much at the time. But I paid. Vindicator presents Arthur Lee in a considerably more rock-oriented and heavier form. The production is far from polished. Quite the opposite – there is something dirty, almost garage-likeabout it. The guitars have real presence, and at times it feels as though the band is playing right on the edge of losing control.“Sad Song” opens the album in a stark and melancholic way, while “Everybody’s Gotta Live” is the record’s great gem. There are still clear psychedelic elements from the LOVE era, but here they meet a rawer, harder and more blues-rock-oriented Arthur Lee. And then, of course, there is that photograph on the back cover featuring Jimi Hendrix. Lee and Hendrix knew each other and had plans for a joint musical project that never came to fruition. Vindicator is an album from the crossroads between the psychedelic era of the 1960s and the heavier rock that would define the 1970s.
Read More
Imperiet - Blå himlen blues
The year was 1985, and I had moved to Lund, very much against my will. My girlfriend at the time had left me after two years together, and my studies were limping along like a shopping trolley with wonky wheels. Most of what I actually did during my few years at university in this particular university town was partying and getting involved in student union activities. Despite this rather unpromising introduction, and the shackles of academia, I was fundamentally quite a positive person – and definitely tireless. Anyone who knows how cramped a student room can be will also understand why my place became particularly attractive towards Friday afternoons, when everyone wanted to make up for lost time and live out their dream of being a newly liberated student. You see, I lived right in the centre, in a flat that was about five times the size of an ordinary student room. It also had two entrances – one proper front door and one for making a getaway – and, as the icing on the cake, a balcony. I was, as it happened, "looking after" a relative's flat before it was eventually put up for sale. Blå himlen blues was released that very year, in March, and I absolutely loved the LP. It had such a strong sense of "to hell with it" and freedom about it that you simply wanted to bellow along to the songs, sober or pissed. I had brought the LP with me from Gothenburg, along with my Lenco L75 and the rest of my stereo equipment, intending only to blow the speaker cones out of their boxes whenever I got the chance. I'd painted those speaker cabinets myself, red and gold, and I exercised them like an unemployed man with nothing better to do. Yes, I hear you thinking: so what? Well, this particular evening, one that remains especially deeply etched in the memory lane, came about when my temporarily live-in mate Jakob had brought six or seven friends over from his home town. Jakob's dad was a fish farmer – salmon, to be precise – and his mum was forever sending him salmon pies to improve his otherwise rather disastrous diet of instant macaroni and ketchup. As a result, I was eating salmon for breakfast and dinner. The mixture of old and new friends, tequila slammers, the stereo at full volume, a fall, and one of Jakob's old homeboys planting his face straight into a pizza-wrapped wall, bleeding down into the gap between "wall and bowl," created an evening that, by today's standards, might not seem entirely well thought through. The atmosphere itself wasn't particularly unusual. It was more the natural consequence of underdeveloped frontal lobes, generally poor judgement, and an enormous amount of flight instinct thrown into the mix. Escape. That was the key. When C.C. Cowboys, the first track on side one, was playing at full volume for the third or fourth time. When "We are the great..." kicked in, the chaos became so uncontrollable that I escaped through the other "entrance" and disappeared into the night, just before the Old Bill turned up.
Read More