12″ Edition of 34. Numbered. Handpainted recycled jacket cover / back art by Luke Csehak.
Out of stock.
Hello Jane Goodall, Are You Listening? is either the 7th, 8th, or 10th lentils album depending on how you count. What separates it from the rest is that it is the first to capture the live sound that they have been cultivating for the past 9 years. The songs were recorded in 4 different studios starting with the first LA Lentils lineup in 2015 and trace 3 or 4 different iterations of the band that have evolved since then. You can see the progression of the band’s sound spread out disjointedly throughout the album with the more rocking tracks representing the earlier lentils (Reptilian Gangsters, The Blogger’s Kiss) that become increasingly fey (Conner’s Crows, Big Day in the World of Exits) before landing on true elf-rock (Abdicating the Crush, Easy on the Shadow Work), a sonic landscape peopled with bassoons, and flutes, and thimble-logic, and quiet, quiet, cultural reticences, and tambourines, and contemporary, adult, ear-points, and barley cakes with long memories, memories of a summer that lies waiting behind each salty bite.
The Lentils are an unassuming outfit of about 13-20 rotating cast members depending on how you count. It started off as a power trio in Brattleboro VT after the lead singer, Luke Csehak’s previous band, Happy Jawbone Family Band, broke up. After a year and 1.5 albums, Csehak went to LA to get away for a spell, which ended up lasting 8 years. Over that time he has added more and more instrumentation to the original power trio format while simultaneously bringing the volume down lower and lower. The Lentils don’t want to impress you. The Lentils don’t want to be influential. The Lentils don’t want social capital. The Lentils want to be there for you when you need them and then you can go on about your life. Maybe ten years later a song will pop into your head. You’ll think, “What is that song?” It seems so familiar. You ask your old friends but they don’t know what you’re talking about. The one or two lyrics you remember at first seemed so strange but now, as the song stays with you for several days, they start to relate to current issues in your life. They don’t provide any answers, but they give you a space to water a knowing, and then just as suddenly as it came, the song is gone and you never think of it again.
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