The Lemon Twigs
Academy 2, Manchester
12th September 2024
The harmony-laden perfection of the D’Addario brothers comes back to Manchester for a night of technical excellence and vocal brilliance, a taste of California sun by way of Liverpool docks. MK Bennett listens in.
Discussing Schoenberg in his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century, Alex Ross suggests that “ he sensed a historical tendency from consonance to dissonance; he felt disgust for a tonal system grown sickly. But the very multiplicity of possible explanations points up something that cannot be explained…” The Lemon Twigs are deeply rooted in the Twentieth Century, musically at least, though the tendency toward joy, for some, the tendency to push back against social dissonance and the ongoing horror of everyday life with perfect harmonies and upbeat music is a fallacy, a lie to oneself and others, but this becomes a matter of approach and opinion. The approach of the Lemon Twigs is to present us with ninety minutes of deep joy, to put away the despair for a while and smile.
The Academy 2, the middle floor of a University Building is the best of the Academy venues, small enough to see from the back, and big enough for decent acoustics, which was needed as the four men onstage somehow made the noise of a small orchestra, swapping instruments as the song demanded, looking and acting as if still practising in their parent’s garage. The comfort they have with each other seems uncanny to the point of telepathy, they may be Outliers, as defined by Malcolm Gladwell, a band who, like The Beatles, have played together for so long that what they do together becomes second nature, the number of hours rehearsed immediately separating them from others with less dedication or time.
They arrive to a raucous welcome, starting with My Golden Years, one of 8 songs from the most recent album A Dream Is All We Know, where they hit a level of seemingly effortless technical proficiency both instrumentally and vocally, a blast of pure vocal honey hitting you in the feelings very early doors, and you know they aren’t backing tracks because these fellas are nothing if not devotee’s of the analogue grind. Next up is The One, which is a reminder they may have other less obvious English influences, as this one has a strong XTC flavour, followed by In My Head from Everything Harmony, when not for the first or last time tonight there’s a strong nod towards ELO and The Move.
What You Were Doing is another dream of a different life, the realisation of this perfect 70s aesthetic, this step back in time is not pastiche or homage, it is every 70s band you never got the chance to see, Badfinger and Wings, Creedence and The Doobie Brothers, a microcosm of all that music, critically lauded or not, playing for your listening pleasure on a brisk Mancunian weeknight. As the perfect brilliance of Live In Favour Of Tomorrow, Church Bells and If You And I Are Not Wise zip by (no hanging around for the end of Freebird here, this is strictly two verses, two choruses, middle eight, finish) there’s no time to be awed by it all, even by the sheer consistency of the heights they reach song-wise, as Any Time Of Day is next, and I Wanna Prove To You.
You’re reminded of a movie called That Thing You Do, written and directed by Tom Hanks, which maintains a sort of imperfect innocence throughout, with a brilliant title track, and the Twigs are very much the equivalent, even their accents (there is a lot of onstage talk and audience interaction) are tremendous, like you would expect a cartoon of the Beach Boys to talk. There’s no dark undertow and if there is it’s buried very deep, too deep for the layman anyway. By the time we have reached A Dream Is All I Know, the singular to the album titles plural and the most incredible hit that was never a hit, the audience are harmonizing to the bands’ harmonies and the room’s natural echo flows from the back wall to the front, the smiles are contagious and the sound is sparking and sparkling and cracking like a rodeo whip.
A Dream Is All I Know is the amalgamated sound of the Nilsson decade, a symbol of Lennon’s Lost Weekend, the antidote to every newsreel image, every horrific online action. You cannot battle these things head-on; you can only offer a brief alternative. A surprising and excellent run through The Stones I’d Much Rather Be With The Boys, giving it a delightful kicking through that lasts a couple of minutes, before the final song Rock On (Over And Over).
Naturally, they were chanted back onto the stage, and then a funny thing happened. When you go and see a band, there is an expectation, an assumption, that whatever else happened during the gig, whether the band played Fleetwood Mac songs in a Ska style or Lounge Jazz was their new direction, you can reasonably guess they will play a couple of hits at the end, crowd-pleasers, the one’s that everyone knows. Instead, Brian D’Addario walks on alone with an acoustic guitar and sings three songs from the Twigs back catalogue, two from Everything Harmony and one significantly older, which is akin to three Madrigals that somehow found themselves on the soundtrack to the Monkees movie Head, yet is completely transfixing, not least because of the incredible voice that is snakes from him, a choirboy in metaphorical leather.
Followed by another new masterpiece How Can I Love Her More, comes surprise number Two in the tombola of the unexpected, a note-perfect and weirdly emotional version of How Do You Do It by Gerry And The Pacemakers, high on the list of not in a million years by anyone else but strangely fitting here, which neatly and with not a little self-awareness segues into Any Time At All by The Beatles, an old rocker from A Hard Day’s Night and a great way to end the evening. The lights are up but everyone is still smiling and happy, even if only for a while.
The Lemon Twigs were a balm, a medicine, a temporary but much-needed salvation. Catch them if you can.
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All words and photographs by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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