Simon Reynolds wrote in his 2010 book of pop culture criticism, Retromania, “Nostalgia gets a bad rap….The past can be used to critique what’s absent in the present.” The Lemon Twigs get a bad rap, too, asterisked by critics who find their music too beholden to their primary influences: the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The band’s D’Addario brothers, while weary of these recurring charges, increasingly embrace their derivative predilections, wittily tagging their sound “Merseybeach”.
The Lemon Twigs are not the first pop group to fly too close to the sun or flip the script on their critics. Oasis spent their entire career outflanking accusations of Beatles pilfering by referencing them with provocative regularity. Moreover, Oasis were associated with a genre—Britpop—that wore its retromania on the sleeves of its 1960s-styled parkas and anoraks. When a retro style becomes a dominant form of present-day popular music, is that just a product of nostalgia or an aberrant psycho-social syndrome? Or both?