Review Summary: Baby’s umpteenth indie album, but they like their first the best.
Picture the textbook definition of a borderline academic indie rock record in this our day and age. This one swagers like a Bowie impersonator, quirkily serenading lost and/or gained love over and over, playing a familiar tune a few times over, displaying enough theatricals in the vocals to count as personality. We’ve had this done a bazillion times, half the time we call “foul play, not cool”, the other half “wow, great indie bangers” or whatever we said about Illuminati Hotties (author’s note: I love me some IH). Lime Garden come in to say that if you’ve tolerated all those apparent AOTY contenders, you might as well make room for
One More Thing. Now, set your prejudice and snobbish laughableness aside and just vibe with the heartbreak-and-or-gain, you dumb ***.
Lime Garden ain’t here to please your intelligentsia need for newness or post-modernism or whatever, they are hellbent at delivering the classic, tried’n’true indie vocations already greatly expanded by their many, many, many predecessors. But if Robert Christgau can praise Tacocat for making menstrual jokes, then you, the not-Robert Christgau, can vibe your scummy ass to a bunch of lovesick, sicklove, loveless, and lesslove tracks embroidered with the patches of Scout’s First Heartache Recovery and many more. Lime Garden may be sour at times, but their sourness does not come from a place of spite, but rather humour. They are laughing at their own misgivings and silly juvenile misfortunes they have not yet outgrown. All that is set to the most baseline indie pastiches this side of Remo Drive, minus the obnoxiousness, plus the talent and personality.
The loveliest sentiment of Lime Garden is their reluctance to be salty, instead welcoming adversity and bizarre challenges with great wit and the silly lil “would you look at that ***”. The three opening songs “Love Song”, “Mother”, and “Nepotism (baby)” enlighten the listener on the narrator’s (or maybe the singer?) relationship to their partner, their mother, and to a privileged friend of theirs. Each song in its own right strikes as full of envy, but also curiosity. The first being a form of declaration of readiness for love, despite the other partner’s being probably unsuitable. But as the frontwoman Chloe Howard repeats several times “This ain’t a love song”. She makes poor case for it being anything but a love song, considering the many pleas of oneness with the other person. Its simplistic progression comes and goes, cutesy melody abound. The same is with the following “Mother”, now shifting its focus to an imaginary child of hers, apparently, all again laced in the brand of adorable indie veneer both sugary and bitter. The song follows Chloe contemplating what it might be like having a child. “Nepotism (baby)” then focuses on a well-meaning friend, whose relative detachment from reality is a little disconcerting to her friends who can see through the intent to just assimilate with the “normies” and feel like a commoner, apparently. Envy lines the tracks, from envy of perfect love, to envy of perfect parenthood, to envy of being able to do whatever the *** you want. But humour is also a determining factor throughout the lyrics, laughing at one’s own situation, difficult to accentuate or grasp.
So much is obvious from “Pop Star”, where the band ironically annotates their own imagined rise to stardom, remarking on their own experience. Granted, the main joke of the song is the insistence on using the jarring autotune, almost like a commentary on all the other pop stars, cementing the band as the quintessential “not like other girls” portraiture. That sentiment largely carries over the entire album, poking fun at the silly relationships folks are getting into, the silly personal comparisons they seek/set for themselves, to silly fear one has, from personal to professional. This all, again, drenched to the bone in some sweet, yet purposefully dime-a-dozen indie dressing. This is like a band that tried their knack at indie rock years ago, then decided that they prefer that initial amateurish charm over whatever refined, polished bull*** counts as sophisticated these days. This is the sound of friends doing friend things, talking about what friends talk about, shooting the air of joking veiling their inner insecurities, concocting songs to heal their hearts, not to appease high-brow connoisseurs who are predisposed to disliking vulnerable music anyway.
