Hate Your Friends

Lemonheads: Evan Dando, Ben Deily (vocals, guitar, drums); Jesse Peretz (bass); Doug Trachten (drums).
Includes 7 bonus tracks.
HATE YOUR FRIENDS includes the band's first recording, the LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE CLEANERS EP.
Personnel: Evan Dando, Ben Deily (vocals, guitar, drums); Doug Trachten (drums).
Photographers: Curtis W. Casella; Anne Peretz.
The Lemonheads' full-length debut--only the impossibly rare seven-inch EP, LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE CLEANERS, its songs included here, preceded it--shows little of the winsome pop and oddball experimentation which would mark their later albums. In the early days, The Lemonheads were a bunch of upper-middle-class kids from Boston's outer burbs having a bash (bassist Jesse Peretz, now a noted video director, was the teenage son of New Republic editor Marty Peretz), and there's a diffidence to this pop-punk record that you can either read as offhand casualness, or lack of true punk spirit, depending on your sensibilities.
Singer/songwriters Evan Dando and Ben Deily traded off between guitar and drums, depending on whose song they were playing, with predictably split-personality results. "Don't Tell Yourself it's Okay" and "Fed Up" are particular highlights.