Menace Beach - Lemon Memory

The Guardian 80

(Memphis Industries)

Related: Menace Beach: 'You need this many people to make this much noise'

Even in an era in which 90s revivalism is the default mode, Ratworld, the debut album from Leeds sort-of-supergroup Menace Beach, felt particularly beholden to its influences: Dinosaur Jr, Pavement, Galaxie 500 et al. Yes, it was a lovingly constructed facsimile, fuzz-swaddled and full of hooks, but a facsimile nevertheless. Good bands soon get bored of such mimicry, though, and follow-up album Lemon Memory sees Menace Beach expand their horizons. Its title is taken from the idea of a “lemon curse”, which bandleaders Liza Violet and Ryan Needham believe was placed on their house. Such loopy occultism sets the scene for an album dabbling in mind-expanding psych (Can’t Get a Haircut), motorik (the excellent Suck It Out) and the more outre edges of 80s and 90s indie. At times, things get impressively creepy – witness Maybe You Drown, which pairs Violet’s chiming vocals with a ghostly organ to create a nightmarish indie nursery rhyme. But all the while Violet and Needham maintain the keen eye for a bubblegum chorus that their early work exhibited. An impressive leap forwards.

Drowned In Sound 30

Second effort Lemon Memory makes me reasonably doubt whether I really liked Ratworld in the first place. On opener ‘Give Blood’, the sort-of duo's on-the-nose approximation of their own genre - complete with Gallagher-esque whinge - combined with the (here unwittingly) absurd rubbishness of the lyrical hook “Why’d you always sing about death?” sound like Vince Noir in a neo-grunge phase. Their previous shoulder-shrugging celebration of their own derivativeness feels like it’s curdled into an arrogant patronisation of the listener.

Indeed, an offputting cockiness seems to define most of the album. ‘Can’t Get a Haircut’ stomp-struts through four excruciating minutes of off-putting swagger, while the sneer of ‘Sentimental’ is hookless, abrasive, angular. In just these two tracks, Menace Beach have encapsulated a whole spectrum of fuckboycore. Lemon Memory feels all about this newfound bravado, which, in finding, has cost the pair their likeability. It means that songs that might otherwise be halfway enjoyable, like the slackerish ‘Darlatoid’ and ‘Watch Me Boil’, and the dreamy, fuzzy ‘Hexbreaker II’, end up just adding to how grating the album is as a whole.

‘Owl’ might be another of these not-quite saving graces, had they not completely ruined the riff, made up of three perfectly good chords (hey, if they’re good enough for Nirvana and Hole…), with the jarring, hugely irritating and totally superfluous slide-staccato quavers. If that part of the riff literally just didn’t happen, the song might even be enjoyable - Menace Beach are at their best combining their fuzzy distorted guitars with their Liza Violet’s dreamy lead vocal. That part of the riff, which crops up in the main vocal line of the chorus too, makes the song near unbearable, and sounds like the laziest stab at inventiveness you ever did hear. There’s no shame in nicking a chord sequence off Nirvana - just ask Oasis - and sometimes, when you have done that, it’s best to leave well enough alone.

Elsewhere, songs like ‘Suck It Out’ – and maybe even ‘Give Blood’ – have the sense that they should work as pop hits. Problem is, they fall flat in not remotely bothering to be made up of words that people can grab onto, that can grab onto people. Their sense of lyrical aesthetics is far too weak for anthem-type songs not to be about anything, and you can’t have anthem choruses that don’t speak to people.

These half-arsed attempts at pop anthems feel off-putting in some of the same ways as the earlier stabs at fuckboycore: again, it feels patronising to hear ourselves being expected to 'really love' this. It’s crushingly disappointing from a band that can sound so much better.