In Defense of Lemon Demon's "View-Monster"
I may be cringe, but I am free
I can already feel the comments pouring in - why this one? Isn’t it for kids? What about his more recent stuff (which I've already written about?) Yeah, yeah, don't worry - I had my Lemon Demon phase come and go when I was fifteen, same as the rest of you. Today I'm here to point out that, well, if this is annoying teenager music, those annoying teenagers don't know how good they have it.
Neil Cicierega, the one artist behind the Lemon Demon project, is a bit of a polymath. He was a driving creative force on the early-2000s internet, pushing forward the cultural development of sites like Newgrounds and Youtube with classic videos like "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny," "Potter Puppet Pals," and the Dadaist-influenced "Animutation" series. When he finally turned that creativity towards more serious, substantial music, it turned out better than anyone could have imagined.
First of all, consider the sonic palette of the album. It's a unique feat of sound design - the idiosyncratic mixing and instrumentation are ahead of their time, unlike anything else available in 2008. (Some would even say this thing is a clear precursor to Gen Z DIY-style Bandcamp music like Uranium Club, and indeed it's practically a holy text in those circles.) Everything sounds like a toy instrument - synths are tinny, charmingly boxed-in, and often bear no relation to any kind of physical sound-maker; guitars have a bizarre gain/EQ effect that somehow creates the audial illusion that they're made of plastic and playing in a tiny plastic room; most impressively, the entire mix is engineered to reflect the sound of his voice. You read that right - the frequencies his voice produces are brought out noticeably more, and only the bass is audible in the low-end, so it feels like you can "hear" the mark of his singing even in instrumental sections. While the remaster currently available on streaming makes the sound much sharper and more professional, the original version, designed for Youtube audio compression, is worth seeking out in all its rough-around-the-edges glory.
The songwriting is just excellent - the Beatles and They Might Be Giants are two obvious reference points, and Cicierega definitely understands the progressive, multi-section song structuring that makes those bands so great. It's musically complex, with charmingly messy vocal harmonies used to create a variety of moods, from heartbreak ("The Satirist's Love Song") to suspense ("The Machine"). But more than that, it's just tight and well-written - every chorus is catchy, sometimes alarmingly so, and the goofy, surrealist lyrics, while they might be a little over-the-top, always stay consistent in tone.
Cicierega was just 21 when the album was made, so it's often a little juvenile in topic, with one of the main themes being childhood nostalgia. "The Man In Stripes and Glasses" uses a strikingly bizarre song structure with abrupt back-and-forth tempo changes to tell the story of a police detective killing Waldo from classic children’s book "Where's Waldo?". Sounds dumb, I know, but he makes it work. Other songs on the album, such as "The Ocean" and "Being a Rock Star," have childishly innocent/simple attitudes to their subject material, the latter offering up the incredibly quotable line "All the greatest love songs / Are secretly about heroin…" More explicitly showcasing the theme, "The Afternoon" is an elegant depiction of childlike curiosity about the world - "the more you grow up, the less and less [imagination and wonder] will show up."
While the whole album is solid, special mention goes to the run of three tracks right before the end of the main album (though there are a few excellent bonus tracks afterwards), which share a theme of the tortured artist. "The Machine" seems to depict the artist at work, telling the story of an inventor whose invention grows absurdly enormous over time due to societal pressure. As the song hits a crescendo, he eventually disappears forever within the still non-functional machine. "Bill Watterson"'s narrator is a deranged fan of the Calvin and Hobbes writer whose parasocial obsession grows to slasher-stalker levels ("So I brought books for you to sign / And I brought shears to cut your phone line"... gosh, isn't this album quotable?), another commentary on the perils of having a massive fanbase. Finally, there's the murky "Something Glowing," which describes an undersea Lovecraftian horror that can't be depicted by stories or songs, perhaps a commentary on more evasive, hard-to-write tunes.
Overall, I would recommend this album to anyone interested in strange, off-kilter music - especially a young person, as it definitely primes the immature ear's taste buds to better appreciate stuff like the Beatles.
Jaffeelabs returns 11/30 with a special episode for the one-year anniversary!