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Review & setlist: The Lemonheads lack rudder, any cohesive sound in return to Boston
Whatever spark might have fueled the harshed-mellow power pop that helped make Evan Dando the bad boyfriend of early-'90s alternative rock was long gone, replaced by a ragged cipher.
The Lemonheads, with Erin Rae, at The Wilbur Theatre, Boston, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025.
For all intents and purposes, Evan Dando is the Lemonheads. Over the course of 11 albums across nearly four decades, no Lemonheads lineup has survived fully intact from one album to the next. But Dando remains, a constant, unchanging strand of DNA connecting the band that made 1987’s “Hate Your Friends” to the one that made 1992’s star-making “It’s a Shame About Ray” to the one that made last month’s “Love Chant.”
It’s a state of affairs that can lead to awkwardness like some of the t-shirts on sale Wednesday at The Wilbur featuring photos of people who haven’t been Lemonheads for decades, while the folks doing the actual work on the stage don’t get the honor of being immortalized in clothing. If the bassist and drummer supporting Dando on Thanksgiving Eve seemed anonymous and disposable, they’re simply part of a long, storied tradition.
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All of which put the onus of carrying on the Lemonheads’ legacy strictly on Dando’s shoulders, and if they were ever sturdy enough to bear the burden, those days appeared to be long gone. The problem on stage wasn’t that the singer was a tyrant or a glory hog or perfectionist or anything else that would normally explain the constant turnover; it was that he wasn’t anything at all. Whatever spark might have fueled the harshed-mellow power pop that helped make Dando the bad boyfriend of early-’90s alternative rock was long gone, replaced by a ragged cipher.
Right from the opening “Roky,” Dando constantly shifted between guitar tones, sometimes up to three of them within a single song, from a trebly, metallic buzz that flattened everything it touched to a creamy lead to relatively clean chords that lacked weight. As intentional as the switches were, it had the effect of making it seem like Dando was trying to locate a usable guitar sound in real time and never landed on one that worked. The tones in “In The Margin” sounded like they came from different songs, refusing to mesh with one another.
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It might have argued for the presence of a second touring guitarist if it weren’t for the fact that there was zero chemistry among the three musicians in the first place. The band was playing the songs at the same time but never quite played them together. And the drums lacked dynamics entirely; the drummer was doing so much work in the puppy-eyed and zippy “Bit Part” and being rudely let down by the mix.
And Dando’s vocals were largely incomprehensible, his baritone slacker murmur lost in the sound. In what might generously be considered a nod to his status as a one-time slacker pinup, he seemed very much like he was just going through the motions on the aptly-titled “Rudderless” and others, a male alt-rock paraphrase of the “Go Girl Give Us Nothing” meme. The energy didn’t improve even when he raised his pulse and started screaming midway through “Pittsburgh.”
By eliminating everything but acoustic guitar and voice, a solo set midway through eliminated many of the variables that had so frustrated the performance up to them. (Not all, though, as an uncooperative sound mix almost sent him to electric guitar for his duet on Gram Parsons’s “A Song For You” with opener Erin Rae.) An a cappella “Don’t Fence Me In” with the audience clapping (for once) on the correct beat was charming, and his raggedness on a fully unamplifed “I’ll Find A Way (To Carry It All)” added a desperation that suited the song. But even without other players and other noises to compete with, he didn’t perform without strain, and a high and quiet “Into Your Arms” sounded like he was barely hanging on.
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All of it muted the power of old favorites like “Confetti,” “My Drug Buddy,” “The Great Big No” and others, which the Lemonheads played without care. “It’s a Shame About Ray” was one of the great elliptical bummers of early-’90s alt-rock, and the band’s approach was to just kind of blow through it. The best that could be said of the power pop of “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” was that it was spirited-ish.
The concert ended with Dando alone once again, singing “Frank Mills” from the musical “Hair” all on his lonesome, first without amplification in the audience and then back onstage in front of a microphone as he slapped his hands against his mouth for a low-fi watery effect. It was one final display of Dando being frustratingly unable to commit to one sound or approach for the duration of a song that refused to cohere as a result, after a performance full of them. It’s a shame about Evan.
Both alone and with Gloucester’s Pete Lindberg providing soft harmonies, opener Erin Rae sang like a tight-jawed Emmylou Harris on winsome folk that was heartfelt and unperturbed.
Setlist for The Lemonheads at The Wilbur, Nov. 26, 2025:
- Roky
- Mallo Cup
- Deep End
- In The Margin
- Togetherness Is All I’m After
- Bit Part
- Hannah & Gabi
- Confetti
- To Live Is To Fly (Townes Van Zandt cover)
- The Great Big No
- Rudderless
- Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (Ramones cover)
- It’s a Shame About Ray
- Tenderfoot (Smudge)
- Hospital
- My Drug Buddy
- Stove
- Pittsburgh
- Cell Phone Blues (with Erin Rae)
Solo acoustic
- Don’t Fence Me In (Cole Porter cover)
- A Song for You (Gram Parsons cover) (with Erin Rae)
- I’ll Find A Way (To Carry It All) (Ted Lucas cover) (with Erin Rae)
- I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) (Aretha Franklin cover)
- Being Around
- Low Expectations (Edwyn Collins cover)
- Withered And Died (Richard and Linda Thompson cover)
- Dimming of The Day (Richard and Linda Thompson cover)
- Into Your Arms (Love Positions cover)
- Ride With Me
Full band
- Mrs. Robinson
- If I Could Talk I’d Tell You
Solo
- Frank Mills (Shelley Plimpton cover)
Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
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