I Love Brotherly Harmonies, so of Course I Love the New Lemon Twigs Record
The D'Addario brothers find their unique footing on 'Everything Harmony'
“They started when they were five and six years old, doing TV and Broadway and things like that. So, they have built-in appreciation for music that is of a couple of generations before theirs. I think they were bored by the music of their own generation, and since you can’t fast forward to the music of the future, you just start going backwards to music that was made before you were born. I can empathize with that impulse, because I did that too, back in the seventies.”
- The legendary Todd Rundgren on The Lemon Twigs
“I Wanna Prove To You,” the opening song on The Lemon Twigs’ 2016 debut record, Do Hollywood, pulls straight from the Brian Wilson songbook as playful baroque surf-pop filled with sugary lyrics and delicious doo-wop harmonies (thankfully sans Mike Love). The Long Island duo, consisting of brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario, pulled from a buffet of sixties and seventies influences on the album, ranging from The Who to Harry Nilsson and Supertramp. But it’s “I Wanna Prove To You” that immediately showed off their paired vocal prowess.
The Lemon Twigs played with the same sound the following year on the excellent follow-up EP Brothers of Destruction. Still, it was a sophomore rock opera concept album about a monkey going to school (the aptly named Go to School). It showed ambition but ultimately failed at reaching the highs the D’Addarios are so readily capable of. Songs For the General Public corrected the course but also suffered from dropping during the summer of lockdowns in 2020.1
It’s here on their fourth record, Everything Harmony, though, where The Lemon Twigs reach their fantastic potential by being no one else but those two brothers that devoured all of these influences from a time long before their existence. Sure, there are moments throughout, like the autumnal Bridge Over Troubled Water lost song in the opener, “When Winter Comes Around,” or the McCartney-esque highlight “Born To Be Lonely.” Still, there’s no denying the confidence in these distinctly D’Addario harmonies.
There are incredible highs in the power pop of “Ghost Run Free,” and the floating glam rock in “What Were You Doing,” but Everything Harmony is made chiefly of sentimental chamber pop, which provides the glue to create their most cohesive album yet. Standout singles “In My Head” and “Corner of My Eye” could have easily been overly played around here, but they always sound as fresh as the first listen. The ballads are also top-notch, like the rawness of “Every Day Is the Worst Day of My Life” and “I Don’t Belong To Me,” one of the songs on Everything Harmony recorded at the brother’s noisy Midtown Manhattan practice space.
Working on other projects like Weyes Blood’s And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, and Todd Rundgren’s “I’m Leaving” seems to have pushed The Lemon Twigs sound into a lusher territory, and this self-produced album is a band-defining effort from two talents still in their early twenties. If things continue like this, we’re in for a real treat.
Endless Harmony is available now on Capture Tracks.
I'm glad I revisited songs For the General Public in the past year. An excellent record that is worth your time.