Where bought? I feel like I've been lugging this mf around for years but the only place it makes sense for me to have bought it is the Alans overstock sale pop-up in 2012. No idea really.
Here's another opportunity for experential music reviewing as the best you will get out of me in a Proustian sense is "listened to this once and hated it and wonder why I still have the bastard following me around all my life." That was quite some time ago now, and my mind and mood change on lots of things. My recollection of it was that it was a bit wacky and turning on a dime faster than I could establish that what my ears had heard was indeed a dime. So to speak.
For those of you who don't know: Cheer-Accident is the band of Thymme (Tim) Jones, a Chicago scene lifer who I became aware of through his appearance in a trailer of a documentary that never came out about the rock group US Maple. I feel like revealing that factoid tells you far too much about me.
Since then Jones has been involved with Todd from US Maple in his follow-up band Dead Rider, who I quite enjoy as it goes. From what I can tell, he's a hugely respected and talented guy, and they're always the ones I feel worst about not liking the music of. Makes me feel like I've got it wrong. The band has also been going for 40 years this year, which is pretty incredible.
Introducing Lemon is, to its discredit, 75 minutes long - two marathon-length pieces taking up a side plus a whole normal length album spread over sides two and three. Side A features 'The Autumn Wind is a Prairie', which after some early bumpy terrain settles into a gentle pastoral glide remniscent of Tortoise or Brokeback. Cheer-Accident lean into prog and noise-rock (they are on Skin Graft after all) harder, and they show their discordant side soon enough. But I think this time I quite liked it, and the last few minutes reminded me of Don Caballero from their What Burns Never Returns LP.
Into side 2 we go with actual songs of regular length. 'Camp O'Physique' is bringing back those memories of wacky music: it's like Cardiacs with a mad scientist, no rocking, and only oddness. 'Zervas' is a brief instrumental that seems to rock out momentarily after a European folk jam. 'Track 29' rounds out the side with a Don Caballero-esque math rock piece; instrumental save for a vocal interjection that seems to have been beamed in from a lost 60s television show. It's very Frank Zappa, from the little I know about Zappa. I don't like Zappa much.
Side 3 starts with a fully formed song called 'The Day After I Never Met You'. The middle 8 is more like a middle 64, which in a sub-3 minute song seems perverse, but it's a good rocker. '(The) Men's Wide Open' sounds like a song being played quietly quite deliberately, 'Smile' welds prog-rock to almost a mid-90s Flaming Lips style beatific pop (I like this one!) and keeps it going without left-turning in the song. The normal length songs wrap up with 'While', which is an experimental piano piece that sounds nice but will annoy 85% of people.
The final cut, 'Find' eats up 22 minutes on side 4, and begins like it is consciously trying to round out an epic journey. Horns stack up, expansive terrain is suggested, the ensemble sounds practised rather than improvised. Before even the four minute mark we've gone through and discarded two different potential math rock avenues. The next ten minutes passes atmospherically, though not boringly, before (almost predictably) returning to grunt and rock out in the last few dying embers of the record.
I'll probably get rid of this when I can. It's better than I recall, and some passages are amazing. But it's too much of an endurance test.
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