It’s a Shame About Ray | The Lemonheads | 1992 | Atlantic | #308
Life doesn’t really add up. How am I supposed to hold down a full-time job whilst having days where from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed I wonder how it is that people actually enjoy life, and yet also fit in days where I’m satisfied enough with my innermost self to not feel like I’m a bit part in whatever world it is where people are comfortably resonating with this album?
I really understand this album. I just feel like like it was written for people who live in a real-life Friends-like sitcom universe.
In a way, It’s a Shame About Ray is an allegory of 90s casualness to life that was part of the zeitgeist of our parents’ generation. Except, littered with trauma and strife (cheap housing stock and an – albeit fucked by Thatcher – post-boomer social economy notwithstanding), they were hardly afforded to indulge in that in their own lives either. So for whom was this written? Folded into the contents of this album are themes of break-up, regret, love-lost, and the general fuckery of life. But as it’s presented it is a mockery of those things. The absolute audacity to deliver these topics in a laissez-faire, jangle pop, easily digestible container. I’ve lost years of my life where The Lemonheads wrote a 3 minute palatable euphony. The arrogance; the gall.
I love this album which is a huge struggle for me because I hate it.