Varshons [PA]

Performer: The Lemonheads
Artist: Kate Moss; Liv Tyler
Engineer: Daniel Rey; Vess VonRuhtenberg; Alex Hartman; Adam Taylor; LonPaul Ellrich; Anthony Saffery; Matt Boynton
Producer: Gibby Haynes; Gibby Haynes
Distributor: RED Distribution

Notes: Personnel: Evan Dando (vocals, guitar, acoustic guitar, omnichord, vocoder, drums, percussion); Devon Ashley (vocals, drums, percussion); Gibby Haynes (vocals, background vocals); Kate Moss , Liv Tyler (vocals); Chris Brokaw (guitar, acoustic guitar); John Frederick Perry (guitar, electric guitar, tambourine, background vocals); Anthony Saffery (guitar, sitar, keyboards, programming); Ian Kennedy (violin); Adam Taylor (keyboards, programming); LonPaul Ellrich (vibraphone); Blake Flemming (drums); Grant Smith & the Power (tabla, bells); Trisha Scotti, Elizabeth Moses (background vocals). Audio Mixers: Alex Hartman ; Adam Taylor; Anthony Saffery. Recording information: Camp Street Studios, Cambridge, MA; Fourth Ave. Recording, New York, NY; Queensize Twin Air, Indianapolis, IN; Vacation Island Recording, Brooklyn, NY. Introduction by: Gibby Haynes. Photographer: Elizabeth Moses. Although covers albums can be the last resort of an artist who has run out of ideas, the Lemonheads' Evan Dando has chosen an eclectic and obscure enough track list to sidestep that issue, and he imbues his renditions with a rootsy sound all his own. G.G. Allin's "Layin' Up with Linda" is transformed from a punk screed to an old-fashioned murder ballad, while Green Fuz's garage-rock classic "Green Fuz" is smoothed out, slowed down, and given a moody reading worthy of Jim Morrison. A fairly straight version of Townes Van Zandt's dark "Waiting Around To Die" is a highlight. Producer Gibby Haynes (Butthole Surfers) keeps things simple, and lets Dando's deep and burnished voice, and the quality of the songlist, shine. Inspirations rarely come more inspired than Gibby Haynes, the leader of the Butthole Surfers. For years, Gibby slipped Evan Dando mixtapes, and the Lemonheads leader pays tribute with Varshons, a covers album largely consisting of songs from those cassettes and produced by Haynes. At first glance this pairing might seem odd, but Gibby and Evan are both old hardcore punks with a taste for the strange. Evan may have crossed over more than Gibby, who made a career out of odd, but he never quite abandoned weirdness, with even Come on Feel the Lemonheads collapsing in the murk of "The Jello Fund." All the same, Varshons is easily the strangest Lemonheads record in maybe two decades and it's not so coincidentally one of their best, perched between the ragged, formless mess of their earliest records and Dando's enduring love for sweetly weathered country-rock. Gram Parsons, Evan's longtime idol, surfaces on Varshons, as does Townes Van Zandt, but a truer indication of the sun-warped spirit of the album lies in how the Lemonheads revamp Wire's "Fragile" into country-rock or how scum-rocker G.G. Allin's "Layin' Up with Linda" is given a murder ballad revision that resonates. But Varshons isn't all country -- there's a thick layer of Texas psychedelic haze, a rather ingenious take on Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful," a duet with Liv Tyler on Leonard Cohen's "Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye," and, popping out of nowhere, a stiff new wave workout called "Dirty Robot" featuring Kate Moss on lead vocals. This sense of adventure ties Varshons to those earliest Lemonheads records, but the group marries that spirit to Dando's exceptionally intuitive interpretive skills, turning the album into a bit of a rough, unpolished gem. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Spin (p.91) - "[T]he countrified take on GG Allin's 'Layin' Up with Linda' provides a moment of effective shock value..." Q (Magazine) (p.125) - "VARSHONS succeeds thanks to an inspired breadth of material..." Paste (magazine) (p.51) - "Dando's rich, thunderous baritone is the star here, falling somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Silver Jew David Berman." Record Collector (magazine) (p.92) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "The joy of hearing Randy Alvey & The Green Fuz's 'Green Fuz,' strummed at the same tempo here as the original Pebbles nugget, is enormous..."

From their roots as a snotty Boston punk band in the mid-1980s to their status as media darlings in the early-'90s, the Lemonheads always revolved around frontman Evan Dando. With his movie-star looks and much-publicized love of drugs and booze, Dando courted attention and controversy while developing into a surprisingly good pop songwriter by the group's 1990 major-label debut, LOVEY. Dando truly hit his peak on the two following albums, IT'S A SHAME ABOUT RAY and COME ON FEEL THE LEMONHEADS, but, unfortunately, so did his drug habit, leading to a substance-soaked bender that began in 1996 and lasted a number of years.

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