The Singles Jukebox

Think of the missed sponsoring opportunities from soap manufacturers…

[Video][Website]
[6.80]

Alfred Soto: Ripping and snarling through rhythmic and chordal dynamics that are guided by the caprices of their lust, this fantastic metal band redress decades of masculine stolidity. Like they demonstrated on “Weatherman,” Dead Sara create the impression that puzzling out their conflicts means finding recombitant guitar parts. Did I mention this song is fun as fuck?
[8]

Sabina Tang: I never got a good grip on “Weatherman,” but this time around Emily Armstrong’s bravura vocals sold me on her first note. (Between the “Lemon Scent” video, Big Freedia, and Tyler the Creator, I vote we imagine a themed boxing match for every single.)
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Despite the red-herring of a WWE Rawk intro, finds its spacey vibe early on and seeks out new angles from beginning to end, making space for choral chants, Auf Der Mar-style verses and plenty of Emily Armstrong huffing and squealing. It may be a little too in love with its exploratory vibe, causing at least a minute of palm-muted dullness, but for the most part “Lemon Scent” promisingly floats, seethes, roams and rumbles.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The overtones produced by Armstrong and guitar on the chorus are phenomenal. Dead Sara seems to build from the melody, so instead of Medley uncorking a standalone solo, they have the rhythm section chant from the back while she unties a few knots. I don’t presume to tell modern rock what to do, but rewarding this would be nice.
[9]

Iain Mew: Like last time, the combination of huge hooks and Emily Armstrong’s scorching vocals is the main attraction, but I also enjoy the way that the lyrics actually play off how filthy the guitars sound. The taunting “does it make you uncomfortable?” is especially fun. 
[8]

Crystal Leww: Emily Armstrong sounds a lot like Alison Mosshart in that bridge where the guitars are churning and the bass hits only every now and then, and she is most compelling in that slow build up the eventual explosion of guitars and screams. The rest of the track is mostly just loud.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The loud, explosive counterpart to an EMA song, perhaps, with the same tweaks of the visceral and unspeakable (and, perhaps, feminine confessional; I can’t help but hear lines like “this is the part where it gets kind of personal — say what you mean, does it make you uncomfortable? Your lies will never sell” today in light of that Cat Marnell book deal); or maybe a straightforward rocker with a twist: instead of verse-prechorus-chorus, this seems to go verse-chorus-prechorus. The former is great. The latter is interesting, but you can already guess the problem.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Anger at hygiene is no longer interesting or works as resistance, but has become its own heavily formalized style. Discomfort can be channeled into usual aesthetic questions and filtered out. The question becomes if the structures of the filtering, or the filtering itself, are interesting enough to justify the questions of style. This isn’t the case here.
[3]

Ian Mathers: Ah, expectations; if I was coming to “Lemon Scent” cold it’d be refreshing, but it seems sturdy where “Weatherman” was towering, never really exploding or taking off (although the end bit is fairly nice). All of which means it feels enough like a quintessential album track that it’s a little worrisome that it’s the third single from their album. “Weatherman” felt like the arrival of something huge; this doesn’t really cede any ground but it certainly doesn’t claim any more of it either.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: As the person who forced “Weatherman” into 2012’s Amnesty Week as an instant [10], I feel a bit bad giving this third single such a relatively low score. (The second single, a bluesy Christmas song, doesn’t really count as a followup.) It’s probably true that my relative lack of appetite for hard rock — only a few rawk songs can get through to me in any given period of time — is unfair to both Dead Sara and to hard rockers more generally, who deserve to have their work heard with open and engaged ears. “Lemon Scent” doesn’t have the rhythmic slipperiness or the structural heft of “Weatherman,” but worse than that, it’s no longer astonishingly new.
[7]