"Everyone will see it, Every demographic!" Between seasons we check out the bonus tracks from Side D of SPIRIT PHONE (2016) by LEMON DEMON

Check out our review of the album proper here. 

Spirit Phone is the seventh studio album by Lemon Demon, a musical project created by American musician Neil Cicierega. The album was released digitally through Bandcamp on February 29, 2016, marking his first full-length album in eight years. All tracks were written, performed, and recorded by Neil Cicierega.

The album's cover art was created by Cicierega's wife, comic book artist Ming Doyle. The song "Sweet Bod" features a guitar solo by Dave Kitsberg of Time Lord rock group Time Crash. The album received generally positive reception and was largely successful, with the track "Touch-Tone Telephone" once being Lemon Demon's most streamed track with over 80 million streams on Spotify. On July 10, 2018, independent label Needlejuice Records announced vinyl, CD, and cassette releases of Spirit Phone.

Chapters

• 0:18 Introduction
• 1:45 Breakdown of the bonus tracks on Side D
• 3:55 Steve’s overall impressions
• 4:46 Dave’s overall impressions
• 7:23 Crisis Actors Studio general impressions
• 8:51 Oh no, Steve almost joined a Nazi band in his hometown
• 9:34 Back to the album, how the album themes differ from these bonus track themes
• 10:48 Redesign Your Logo general impressions
• 13:11 Pizza Heroes general impressions
• 14:16 You’re At The Party general impressions
• 15:47 Angry People general impressions
• 18:02 Studio vs Live setup
• 19:29 Steve imagines a Neil Cicierega and Jeff Rosenstock crossover album
• 19:44 Kubrick and the Beast general impressions
• 20:30 Thoughts on video game music
• 23:05 Final thoughts on Side D of Spirit Phone
• 26:01 Social Media and Band plugs

Transcript

0:18

And welcome to a bonus episode of Side One, Side B. I'm Dave. I'm Steve. And this one is kind of a follow-up to our Lemon Demon one from earlier this year. We had, oh, last season. This season, however, we want to count the bonus episodes within that. This year, we'll just say this year. As your father, I expressly forbid it. Yes. This is the last side with the bonus tracks. If you get the CD version, there's a lot more bonus tracks. But since this is a bonus episode, we're just going to do the one side. So this will be our first episode where we don't have a flipping component. So it'll be exciting. Yeah, this is the bonus disc for Spirit Phone by Lemon Demon. Wish we could have taken the time to invite Dan over, but It's hard to schedule with people sometimes. Yeah, plus these are bonus episodes. Kind of want to keep these a little more no-frill. It's going to be interesting to try to rein us in when Sean brings his EPs in. Yeah, it'll be fun. Yeah, this is officially probably our last EP episode with just the 2 of us. Might be our last episode with just the 2 of us, honestly, if things go. I don't think we'll do the premiere with just the 2 of us like we did at the beginning of this season, next season. yeah maybe maybe we'll see so like you said sometimes it's hard to schedule people yeah yeah this these are the bonus tracks to uh spirit phone by lemon demon i'm gonna grab the sleeve real quick and read the tracks we've already done the artwork i will say i particularly enjoyed the uh the album listening to it again when i was editing the episode a good listen for a second time yeah Yeah, it was really good. Like, these bonus tracks are not as, like, as carefully put together and layered as the other ones. They're still, like, good songs, but he didn't put, like, as much work into finishing them as the others, so they're a little more stripped back. But yeah, on this side D, and side D only, we have It says on the sleeve, Crisis Actors. The full name of the song is Crisis Actors Studio. Uh Redesign your logo. Pizza Heroes You're At The Party, which is probably the best one on this, Angry People, and Kubrick and the Beast. Did he predict the Cracker Barrel situation with the Redesign Your Logo? Kinda. You'll see. We'll talk about that more after we listen to it, but that one's, like I said, You're At The Party is the best song on this, but Redesign Your Logo might be the most interesting. So, yeah, we'll see. This is a lot more of the same, to some degree, just a little more stripped back. It sounds a lot like the other one, like Oingo Boingo minus the ska components. Kind of like the edgy, nervy, kind of geeky synth rock, synth pop approach. But yeah, this is A lot of fun. He is the only musician on this. As you know, he was the only musician on the main tracks, except for a guest guitar solo on Sweet Bod. So this is very much a singular vision thing. Yeah, I don't think we have much to cover in terms of background and whatnot. Yeah, if you want any of the background on all this, listen to the first episode, and then we will get the record started and dive into the tracks. And we are back from Side D, the bonus tracks of Spirit Phone by Lemon Demon. Steve, overall impressions. I really liked it. I liked all the songs as much as anything on the proper album. I did notice that the production was less so than the album proper, just in little ways that I think most non-musicians or non-producer people probably wouldn't even notice. But I did notice that while on the proper album he would make like more attempts to keep the instruments out of the way of each other on this one it seemed like everything was more or less just kind of playing at the same time yeah but but it still sounded great so i'm not like knocking at any points on that i think there's a time where i probably wouldn't even notice and i might not even notice if you hadn't even mentioned it so yeah there but overall i thought the the songwriting was just as good as anything on the album Yeah, I liked it. The songs don't feel quite as finished as the ones on the main album in that there's a couple where it doesn't feel like he had quite figured out where to end it. So it seemed like a little half-baked, but I think if he had given it more time and had decided to make the album longer, he could have worked out whatever, any of the rougher bits of what wasn't finished about him. They were They were good, they just needed a little bit of editing, in my opinion. Yeah, they were great songs, and they all had great hooks and great ideas in them, and I kind of wish he had just made a longer album. I think he probably thought the album was long enough, and it filled a full CD, but I think You know, if he would have treated it like, if he would have thought of it as, like, a double LP rather than as a long CD, he probably could have, like, fleshed these out a little more and made a longer album. And there's, like, places where I can imagine them fitting on the album as a whole. he rearranged the tracks some. Like redesign your logo. We'll get into that a little more later, but that definitely would have fit with that side with all the songs about, you know, like capitalism and corporate gains and all that. Yeah. I'm impressed with him as a multi instrumentalist, too, because you can tell all the synth parts he did, but You can also tell when he was, like, using a real guitar and a real bass. It's like the drums were programmed, but he was really good at programming the drums. So, like, they did, like, they did, like, some good stuttering and syncopation stuff, which is hard to work with with drum machines and, like, shows that he has a good ear for that kind of stuff. Yeah. Some people put down, like, programming, like, synths and drums and stuff like that, but I think it's an art form in its own. And I like the mix between, you know, like sequenced arpeggios on the synth and then like the live lead stuff he had over it too it was like this was like these songs were cool and i kind of wish kind of wish he had included them on at least a few of them on the album proper and like made it a longer album but yeah yeah there were some moments that uh reminded me a bit of uh that craftwork album that we reviewed last season yeah yeah uh i'll bet he's a fan oh he definitely is i think I think a lot of people who are really into synthesizers are at least pretty familiar with a lot of Kraftwerk. Yeah. But yeah, track by track, there are 6 songs on here, which is a lot, and they're all pretty, you know, like, packed songs, so we'll just get started. first up, Crisis Actors Studio. I like the use of the vocoder on it and the guitar. Like, some cool, like, background filter sweeps. I like the guitar solo. This was, like, the most, like, new wave out of all of them. This sounded like it would This sounded like it would be, like, something you would hear on, like, one of the cool LA rock stations in, like, Yeah, I could tell that the synth sounds were modern, just because I'm familiar with synth sounds and the eras they belong in. But besides that, I felt if you took the song back to the mid-eighties and played it at a club, nobody would have had an eye at it. I think everybody would have gone crazy at it. And then the outro part, where we kind of thought that the song ended But it was just kind of a continuation of this song. To me, it sounded like a Sega Genesis just kind of going crazy. I could picture Sonic the Hedgehog running to that portion of the song. Yeah. And lyrically, I thought it was cool. I like the idea of a crisis actor's studio. You know, like a place where crisis actors go after faking a mass shooting and just kind of hanging out and interviewing each other. Yeah, this is a This one's for Alex Jones. Yeah. Alex Jones and his new Hitler mustache. Oh, my God. Really? Oh, yeah. I haven't heard about that. Yeah. There are pictures. Oh, my God. I talked about this on the podcast before, but when I was first starting to get into guitar well not when I was first starting it into guitar but when I was first just trying to join bands I accidentally joined a Nazi band and One of them shaved his mustache down to a Hitler stash and this is oh this was early thousands So at that point I thought everybody was just you know ironically doing stuff like that oh my god yeah he actually did it he does kind of look like jay jonah jameson though yeah so i guess i was fitting that they turned him into like an alex jones type in the the new universe yeah Yeah, there's a lot of songs on the album proper that explore this paranoia and conspiracy theories and stuff. The album itself, I think, leans more into cryptids and stuff, so this is adjacent to that. People like Alex Jones are a cryptid, I think. Yeah. Yeah, this touches on the Alex Jones realm of paranoia, while the other ones are more coast-to-coast AM. But yeah, I liked it. It's a good song, it's a cool song. It thematically fits with the rest of the songs about aliens and cryptids. Because you know, like I've heard, people who are not just right-wing nuts like Jones think other things are crisis actors just because it is convenient for their political narrative. And it's not like. it's never happened. No, and it has happened Like they have. They have faked things or framed people for things, and by they I mean the federal government. Yeah, It's a cool song. I like it Would've fit well on the album.

Next up is what I said was the most interesting of the bonus tracks: 10:48

Redesign Your Logo. So what did you think of the lyrics? The lyrics I really like the overinflated ego of the song's narrator. I've met people like that that think like, oh, if we just change the logo, yeah, we're going to turn everything around, And I don't know. with the lyrics of basically this whole side, I feel like he just basically predicted the next ten years. That's what it feels like to me, because the first thing, of course, the first thing I thought of was that recent Cracker Barrel bullshit. Yeah, The funny thing about this is it's not entirely something he wrote lyrics wise, and that he was he found like a leaked corporate memo and like, expanded on it and riffed on it. But it is. it is based on actual corporate speak. Yeah, that's why the over-inflated ego of the song's narrator was so accurate. yeah, which, yeah, it's, it's a great song. it's a fantastic song. there's a lot to love about it other than just the lyrics, but i think the lyrics are what stand out the most. so i really wanted to start with that. yeah, i like the snaky bass that gave it kind of like a good kind of creepy forward momentum, but also, you know, kind of, just like it's a little slimy, it's. uh, The narrator is someone who doesn't have your best interests in mind, And the tone for it was also great, Just the perfect, snaky bass line with the perfect bass synth tone to match it. I was just watching a World War II documentary and they were talking about, like, all the appeasement shit that they did to Hitler, And one time he tried to get away with that. Oh, I'm not pro-war, I'm an artist. Yeah, I imagine, like Hitler in his artist days, was a lot like this person. Yeah, Yeah, I liked, like the creepy kind of spoken vocals over, like the sang vocals, like in the background. I thought that was like a good contrast. Yeah, I liked that too, And I liked- He made the right choice- having, like the spoken vocals, be like the lead and the forefront vocals because, just like it was a unhinged, slimy vocal delivery that really fit the mood of the song very well. Yeah, Might be my favorite on this side was this song. I can see that It's a good one. Like I said, it's the most interesting one, even though it's not my favorite. Next up we have Pizza Heroes, which I consider the least essential on the side, but it's still a great. It has a high bouncy energy and it's a lot of fun. I really liked it. I thought it sounded like As soon as I saw the title, the first thing I thought was Teenage Mutant, Ninja Turtles, and as soon as the song came on, I'm like, oh, yep met that expectation. Yeah, that reminds me of being in an arcade in like. yeah, exactly, yeah, It does tie into a little bit to redesign your logo, like when, at the end, where it's talking about all the demographics it will deliver to. But yeah, it's I can. This is the one that I can most see on the cutting room floor, though, When he was deciding what to include because the album was getting long. I can see how this could have been an early cut too. Yeah, it doesn't really fit in with the cryptid theme of the album proper. Not really. no, Yeah, but it's good, and I'm glad he included it as a bonus disc. but this is just like the only one I wish he hadn't found a way to like. weave into the other ones. Yeah. And then next we have the song I said was my favorite, and it still is. You're at the Party. The thing that stuck out to me the most is the choices of synth that he had on it I thought was really interesting, especially during the, I want to say, the bridge part, when it kind of went to a lower sub-bass type of synth. Yeah, I really like this song, like lyrically, I like that. it's about hearing a neighbor's party, and then it kind of turns into like weird nightmare logic, where it's like people are getting killed, or maybe they're not, and then it's, uh, like you're being like drawn and compelled to join it, like it's like a plague era, you know, like ecstatic dancing plague type thing, like uh, like in late medieval europe when everyone was losing their mind because, like large portions of the population, was dying of the bubonic plague. and just like yeah, just like the unhinged nightmare logic to the whole thing. and i liked how, like little discordant counter melodies were slowly inserted into it as it kept going and

losing more touch with reality. this is the one that i most like. the reason why this is my favorite is: this is the one that i most wish had found a way to like: 15:18

make it onto the album proper. just, uh, they fit in with the theme. uh, based on how you just described it, i'd say yeah, yeah, love the little breakdown in it. yeah, just a really really cool and unsettling song, and it's one of the ones that you pick up a little bit more on it every time you listen to it too. yeah. And then we have angry people, Evil babies with guns, Evil babies with guns. America. Again, it's like he could see into the future, And I guess that just kind of says that things haven't really changed a whole lot in the last ten years since this came out right. Yeah, Because it really describes like the MAGA wing of America. But I mean those people have always been here. I mean both you and me were, I don't know, radicalized during the Bush administration. That's all the same stuff in a different rapper, you know. Yeah, And I liked. I liked the idea of like. it was just like awful resentful people raising an awful resentful child that takes out their anger on them as well as on other people. Which happens, Yeah? which happens, Yeah? it's just like a really mean, nasty song and it works really well.

I also joke in my notes. it's the same premise as Oedipus or Eraserhead: 16:47

The parent resenting the child and the child being like a force of destruction to some degree. Yeah, and I liked the chorus, like the and like ending with the like pleading. everything's completely normal. But you could see that as ironic. you know, like everything is not normal and someone's pleading. Or you could like read that more straightforward. This is the way of the world. It's normal for, uh, for people to raise what destroys them basically. yep, yeah, i liked it. i really liked that like, like that hook, like the hook to the chorus, like the. we're angry people exploding with love. yeah, like it, like great little vocal melody. um, i've met a lot of people like that, they, uh, they're psychotic. parenting of produced psychotic children, like somebody i grew up with, was a lot like that. yeah. and, uh, yeah, life didn't turn out great for him. Yeah. And while I have said so many good things about this song, I do feel like this is one of the examples of one where he could have figured out how to end it a little more, Because it feels like it meanders a little bit before getting back into the hook at the end, and it's good. But yeah, like it could have, I feel like if he had just worked on it a little more, it would have been great on the album too. Were the songs on the album itself were they produced by him? Yeah, Entirely Okay. Yeah. it was entirely like him in the studio. When he tours. he tours with Like as a 4piece band, like bass guitar drums, with him on like synths and vocals. but like in the studio, it's mainly just him playing and doing everything, like producing all the instruments except for the occasional guest, And like the way he does like. if you ever listen to stuff he releases under his name, rather than as Lemon Demon, where he does like remixes and mashups of songs, he really knows his way around the studio and how to like work with stuff Like, if you really want to listen to him like, do like listen to, like the Mouth Moods album, where he does a bunch of mashups and most of the songs include All Star by Smash Mouth. in some regard It's really good. He also has one called Mouth Silence, where he refuses to use All Star. Oh my God. Yeah, like, he knows his way around all the technical parts of producing really well, which is why I think these songs are so great, because he knows where there's space and where there isn't. So even in these ones that are a little less worked on and less finished, they still sound great.

They just hadn't put as much time into them as he did. the final ones on the record: 19:29

Yeah, I'd like to see him work with Jeff Rosenstock, another podcast alumni. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I think those 2 would get along based on hearing these 2 records. Yeah, it would be like the punk and the nerd, And then, closing it out, we have the instrumental Kubrick and the Beast. To me, this sounded like pure Japanese puzzle game music. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. I liked how this one was definitely bass guitar, not synth bass. I liked how prominent the guitar was in it. There was a lot of All. the main melodies were on synth and all that, but this one, the guitar and the bass, were in a pretty prominent place. This one seems like It's one made a lot for like the band playing live too. I would love to. I would love to hear him on I don't know if he tours anymore, because this album came out a long time ago. But I would love to see him on tour and to, like This would be a good one to hear with the full band. Maybe you want to play Bust a Move, where you're a cute little dinosaur shooting gems at other gems and trying to make them not be gems anymore yeah a lot of this does sound like video game music but you know he was he's a nerdy guy approximately our age like he grew up with video games oh yeah i mean i uh video game music inspired my own music uh quite a bit you know a lot of the i grew up with the sega genesis so it's not surprising to me that i gravitated towards heavy metal after you know hearing the gritty heavy metal soundtrack of a I think the way I first heard a lot of heavy metal songs was the totally not ripping them off and doom. Yeah, yeah. This totally isn't like a MIDI synth cover of Judas Priest song, guys. Don't sue us. I know they straight up did like a Pantera song and it's It wasn't just, yeah, it was like any heavy metal band that you can think of a guy around that age having listened to, you can at least find pieces of it all throughout the Doom soundtrack. I remember there was an Angry Video Game Nerd episode where he was talking about lgn yeah ljn games uh which is like the shitty video game company more or less uh but but they did produce like a few good video games and one of them was a spider-man game called maximum carnage yeah and there's a boss battle where they just straight up lifted the the solo from uh mob rules by black sabbath just that whole section like note for note like a mini rendition of it like not like the recording but yeah it's like man any other business you would never be able to get away with it I think video games in that period knew that copyright lawyers wouldn't find what they were doing. Yeah. Well, it's like, you think Tony Iommi was playing Maximum Carnage? No. No. He was too coked out to play video games. Yeah. And he hadn't been playing them since he was a kid, so he probably, like, even if he tried playing the game, I don't think he would get that far. Yeah, I can't imagine any of the guys from Black Sabbath playing video games. Maybe Ozzy. Yeah, maybe Ozzy. And maybe Ozzy because his kids made him. Yeah, exactly. Well, Ozzy kind of reminds me a lot of my dad. Just when I watch the Osborne stuff, it's like, oh, he's like a dad. Just like a regular dad, basically. Yeah, all he's like sneaking food out of the kitchen. Yeah. But yeah, that was Side D of Spirit Phone. I like just listening to the first 3 sides as their own standalone thing, and then coming to the bonus tracks later. It's like, they're good songs, but they aren't, you know, like, they don't fit in with the album if you listen to them right after spiral advance because spiral spiral advance is a great album closer yeah and they're not you know they don't sound as finished so it's a little bit of a disconnect so but yeah like they're they're great to just listen to on their own they're fantastic i would recommend like listening to them If you get the record. It's like the opposite of the Iced Earth album, where all the boring, mediocre songs are the actual album, and then the part where they put a bunch of effort to was the Gettysburg Trilogy. Yeah. It's like, if I ever listen to that album again, it would probably just be that last side. If we ever do a live podcast, we still need to make Sean listen to the Gettysburg Trilogy. I was going to say, I should have made him for this round of EP episodes, but we'll do it next season. We will. Yeah, live epi- like, I would still, like, if this was successful enough for us to sell tickets, I would still like to do a live thing, but I just want to figure out how we would do it. sit in a room full of people and make them listen to a record with us in silence. Should be pretty funny. I just be like we do with with the guests. I mean, we obviously the the audience doesn't get to hear it. But I mean, we all bullshit while we're listening to stuff. And like sometimes sometimes the records kind of become secondary even. Yeah. Like if we're not into it, like we'll just start talking about random random bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. Which maybe means if we do a live one, we do a quiet listen through on our own before. Yeah. All right. And so that was this bonus episode. Yeah. Spirit phone by lemon demon. Check it out. Great album. Catch you on the flip side. Please check out the description for more information about the guests and the album reviewed. You can find us on blue sky under the names, kill rock music. That's K I L R a V O C K and Dave under beast master general. You can find us on Instagram under kill rock music, S W S and Dave underscore diction. And you can also find our regular contributor, Sean, under the name Loserslug. You can find Steve and Sean on threads with the same usernames as Instagram. Check out our post-punk band, The Illiterates, our experimental group, Lucid Fugue, and Steve's solo project, Kill Rock, on most major streaming platforms. You can visit Steve's website, killrockmusic.com, for easy access. That's K-I-L-R-A-V-O-C-K music.com. And if you want to check out Dave's past band, Gong Farmer, and their album, Pop Dada, you can do so on Bandcamp. Thanks. Ejaculate and leave. Cool.