These Golden Years Fly By

Grooving to the Lemon Twigs at the Belasco, A. J. Urquidi finds hope for the future in weaponizing the past.

By A. J. UrquidiNovember 26, 2024

THE LEMON TWIGS: NORTH AMERICAN TOUR, The Belasco, Los Angeles, November 22, 2024.

Nostalgia has its detractors in the year 2024—for good reason. As malicious, misinforming agents continue tipping US culture toward a disemboweled, evil-pilled simulacrum of its worst eras—rife with never-ending film-franchise reboots, flourishing conspirituality grifter movements, and the enshittification of anything corporate monopolies can wrap their eldritch tentacles around—wistful infatuation with imaginary bygones is only digging our hellhole deeper. So how do we combat the substitution of authentic history with the plastic platitudes of late-capitalist recycling? What if, instead of looking ahead for solutions, we extract a comparable weapon from the rear-view and reconstitute it as motivating countercultural ambience, upgraded and perfected, to fight the twisted past’s resurgence on its own terms?

From the milieu of cultural regression emerges a favored contender to soundtrack the revolution, crammed into a boomer-friendly Trojan horse: a band of boyish brothers from Hicksville, Long Island. Like a Richard Linklater opening scene, the Lemon Twigs descend from a 1971 Oldsmobile with pec-hugging muscle shirts and hippie mop tops, having resurrected several long-faded genres—Nuggets, rock opera, glam, power/sunshine pop—over the span of a mere decade.

There’s not a single sonic moment on their albums you haven’t encountered before if you’ve heard a rock single released between 1964 and 1979; they’ve taken the coolest components of the Brill Building, Beach Boys, Beatles, Band, Byrds, Badfinger, Big Star, Bowie, Boston, Buffalo Springfield, even Bimon & Barfunkel, and turned them into … more of the same, but gratifyingly so. The band revels in beating their influences at their own game, in a way that feels more revamp than rehash. There’s a sense that Lemon Twigs arrangements, especially on their three latest albums, have been rolling around the post-Nixon collective unconscious, awaiting a stoned diviner to summon them through the linoleum floor at Sound City. These aspiring champions of nostalgia have done just that, dropping us at the front lines of 1960s unrest, arming themselves with soda-pop doo-wop harmonies and heartbreak-hardened determination to safeguard the youth in their war against retro-fascist forces.

The band commandeered Downtown’s Belasco stage Friday night, following a snappy performance by San Francisco jangle-revivalists the Umbrellas. A group of early-twentysomething attendees, not much younger than the Lemon Twigs themselves, punctuated the changeover with a cappella anthems we were unquestionably about to hear anyway. It’d been a while since I’d seen such a shamelessly invigorated fan base. Sparks of effortless Laurel Canyon cool were in the air. The Twigs immediately confirmed my suspicions that they’re at home in the past: they kicked off by taking stock of their golden years in what’s become my top earworm for months, purely from a multifaceted-songwriting perspective. And I wasn’t the only reveler eating it up.

The distractingly handsome boys looked as Stooges-meet–T. Rex as you’d expect after glimpsing the cover of their latest album. Older brother Brian D’Addario (lead vocals, guitar—whom I’ll call B-D’Ad) sported the angular profile of a cockatoo and the soloing chops of Neil Young; younger bro Michael (lead vocals, guitar, occasional bass and drums: M-D’Ad) wore the sly expression of a mischievous tortoise, which was exacerbated by the brothers’ natural banter voices bearing a copyright-infringing resemblance to OG Donatello and Raphael. Rounding out the touring band were Danny Ayala (keys, bass) and Reza Matin (drums), two dudes who made for a fun gang to play Atari with in the D’Addario family garage.

Twigs songs shuffle all over the place, complete with shifting time signatures, unpredictable key changes, and precision vocal harmonies from all four members, but witnessing these cocksure bastards fart them out onstage in a marathon stretch, hopping between instruments with pauses only to rib each other and craft double entendres about a “hot mic” (like brother Mike, ha!), you’d be forgiven for thinking this was simple teenybopper music. Throughout the set, it felt like I was alternately watching Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Turtles, or Cheap Trick, with mimetic originals bookending crate-dug covers of the Move, the Choir, and more; so many references danced beyond the tip of my tongue that I eventually just surrendered to the Kinksesque soundbath immersion. The guys demonstrated their abilities as human jukeboxes before my very eyes, manifesting as a Haight-Ashburian foil to the contemptuous conservative strategy of “flooding the zone with shit.” My only gripe with the set list was its exclusion of the best woe-is-me mantra this side of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” Perhaps B-D’Ad and M-D’Ad wanted to keep the mood optimistic, knowing we’d have bigger issues to worry about once we exited into the dystopian night.

Wrestling the metastasized tumors of bigotry, greed, and ignorance into remission is bound to be the 2020s’ most unforgiving struggle. How groovy that the Lemon Twigs have set the stage for the counterculture with peace, love, and everything harmony.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.