Love Chant

While not as accessible as It’s A Shame About Ray or as punk-focused as Hate Your Friends, Love Chant is an impressive blending of both styles.

The sound overall mostly evokes the primordial, punky, pre-grunge Lemonheads, leavened now as then by Dando's insuppressible pop sense. [Dec 2025, p.33]

Love Chant is a wonderful and surprisingly vital return to the fray. [Nov 2025, p,75]

Love Chant might also be described as scrappy, vulnerable and heartfelt, but it is also loose, exuberant and animated in a manner that seems faithful to who Dando is today. [Nov 2025, p.84]

Not everything works in Love Chant. He tries to sound self-serious with his stream-of-consciousness rambling on “Marauders,” but instead, comes across as artfully silly. Still, it’s just one of the many fun detours that Dando takes throughout the album, one whose existence—given his history of substance dependency—feels like a small miracle in itself.

Love Chant leaves no doubt that he has a ways to go on both his personal and songwriting journeys, but it proves that he’s already well on his way, looking to the past to push his sound—and self—forward.

‘Love Chant’ takes time to sink in, but it grows on the listener with every return.

Evolving his signature sound with country and psychedelia is a good fit, and the aforementioned highs make the record worth a listen. Hopefully, this is the first phase of a new chapter for the Lemonheads.

There’s a pleasant sea-change at the mid-way point on “Togetherness Is All I’m After”, with the dropping tempo allowing some finer feeling and vocal range to return, but tracks like “Cell Phone Blues”, “Love Chant”, and “Marauders”, feel forced and lumpen.

With the exception of a few clunkers, this disjointed flow becomes a defining characteristic of Love Chant. There’s a sense throughout that Dando is now comfortable enough with himself to take all the time he needs to explore weird ideas and decide where they start and end. That embrace of his own artistic whims is admirable, as is his choice to tread new ground rather than try to re-create his most successful work from the past.