OCD Chronicles: Lemonheads "Half The Time"

On that list to the right, one of those albums probably contains a song that is obsessively going through my head and altering my reality. At the present moment, that song is Lemonhead’s “Half The Time” from their album Lovey. A few weeks ago it was a song by Black Moth Super Rainbow (which had me singing like a robot at work), before Lemonheads it was Camper Van Beethoven’s “Joe Stalin’s Cadillac,” and on one occasion it was Axe’s “Rock & Roll Party In The Streets.” Hey, I never said all the shit was good; all I said was that there was one song going through my head at a ridiculous pace.
Now it’s a Lemonheads song; a band that I’m not terribly a fan of. At one time I enjoyed Hate Your Friends, Creator and the aforementioned album Lovey, but I believe I lost interest just around the same time most people started to fall for It’s A Shame About Ray. I was more of a fan of their heavier stuff, and Ray seemed to be an album hooky enough to woo the “120 Minutes” crowd. Evan Dando started to come across like this poster boy idol willing to compromise integrity for notoriety. It’s true: people in their twenties dwell on shit like that.
The irony isn’t lost on me that the song I was immediately drawn to from their album Lovey was a song that shares similar characteristics with “It’s A Shame About Ray.” It’s mellow, it’s hooky, its Dando showing interest in accessibility and it is, in short, a great little pop tune.
Set against a frolicking clean chord progression, Evan sings some of his best lyrical contributions that manage to be clever (“When day gets dark it seeps into my skin”) and tap into twentysomething observations (“Mountain Dew and Marlboro/While I stew over all I owe”) in less than three minutes. Some fairly weak-sounding distortion enters around the phrases that lead up to the chorus, but Dando hits paydirt when he finally gets to the chorus:
“Your one light slowly fading in my mind
The farthest from my head
Half the time”
There’s a little bit of color to Dando’s ambivalence as he sheepishly recalls an ex girlfriend that he treated like shit. Regardless of how stoned he is, or how callously he dismissed her, he’s now realizing that she’s harder to forget than he would like to admit.
Even the second verse of the chorus gives another good line:
“A simple point too bright to leave the sky
You’re dissolving in my eye
My closed eye
Half the time”
“Half The Time” stands as one of a handful of Lovey tracks that keep the album from completely floundering. It’s an album that reeks of Dando’s complacency; hinting one moment at a budding talents and slacking off with half-baked ideas.
The song spotlights his abilities while, perhaps, finding the confidence to expose his sentimental side on future efforts. He did, with great impact on subsequent albums, but “Half The Time” works better for me as Dando’s voice sounds “in the zone;” a stoner who just smoked his way towards attempting a sentimental statement.
It’s frustrating how Evan parlayed his good looks into a few years of not actually doing anything excepting coming across as the dude that chose drugs over banging every chick on the planet. Seriously: Dando always seemed like the bad boy chicks like Tonya Donelly would fuck and let walk all over them.
It’s by no means groundbreaking and the Lemonheads are hardly a band that I will pretend to be anything more than barely mentionable second-tier alternative act from the late 80’s/early 90’s. But for the time being, a song that they did seventeen years ago just happens to be the best song ever recorded.