The San Francisco based alternative surf rock band, Lemme Adams released a new EP last week. The five track album is entitled Black Flamingo and is a strong follow up to their debut album Gorilla Back.
Lemme Adams, as a band is able to incorporate horns into their dark surf rock sound in a super tasteful manner. The horns never bleed over into playing cheesy ska riffs or come off sounding overly "Mariachi", even when performing music for the Latin themed third track, Venezuela. Jordan Miller’s bassy tribal drum beats and Adams’ signature vocals make the album familiar and warm in regards to the musical style relating to their previous release. Nonetheless, Adams as a songwriter wrote more about what was going on around him while maintaining a bit of subjectiveness in this collection of songs. You can still pinpoint Adams’ perception and opinion about what he’s lyrically describing, but he’s less emotionally direct than his writing was in the last album.
Adams has the ability to write incredibly cynical songs that don’t put you off or seem unnecessarily confrontational. The title track of the album (which houses some nice faux improvised jam outs) along with the second song, Hella seem to be about general disillusionment with social popularity. Both songs talk a lot about friends, and Hella seems to point out "friends" inconsistencies and trivialness. Hella is a Californian slang term that means "a large amount of" and can be easily overused in conversation. The irony of the word is not lost on Adams in regards his parody of how many times the word can be said and heard if one is in a group of young people in Cali.
The third song, Venezuela captures the sunny feel of the South American country as Adams sings about not being able to escape the sharp sunlight. Christmas Spirit goes along with the band’s weird theme of writing and performing Christmas music all year around, and of course, Toys, the song of the band’s award winning music video has finally made its debut on a recording.
Great record. Good job! Take a listen to Black Flamingo!