With her third album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, the Pittsburgh-based Merce Lemon partnered with producer de jour Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee, etc.). As a result, Lemon’s sound is notably more dynamic and multifaceted. Additionally, to her credit, her melodies are steamier and hookier. Lyrically, she constructs sleek images and oblique declarations, addressing the desire for change, for a copious love (human and cosmic), and to transcend the bounds of habit and self. If her previous work showed her navigating the overlap between coffee-shop folk and bedroom pop, Watch Me illustrates her natural ability to embody a more ambitious and multilayered sound.
With “Birdseed”, Lemon establishes a fertile balance between elusiveness and accessibility. “I’m the bird that sings so goddamn loud / it wakes you up at dawn”, she moans, yearning to exceed her conditioning and egoic compulsions, to be free of self-consciousness. With the five-and-a-half-minute masterstroke, “Backyard Lover”, Lemon and Farrar collaborate seamlessly. Lemon occurs as alternately fragile and audacious, her voice fluid, then clipped. Occasionally her evocative pivots bring to mind Maple Glider, though Lemon is more diaristic and less observationally oriented, ultimately striving for a confessional catharsis. In this way, she has more in common with the beguiling Indigo Sparke. As the track progresses, it builds organically; guitar parts grow more prominent, the drums more propulsive. Around the three-and-a half-minute mark, a lead guitar streaks across the audial field. The mix is soon elevated into an equally thrilling and jarring gestalt that eschews folk/pop templates, morphing instead into a stadium-ready brand of Americana a la Ethel Cain’s 2022 LP, Preacher’s Daughter.
“Window” is a slowed-down, sultry riff on dissociation and loneliness (earthly and/or perhaps subsequent to death). Merging folk and slowcore sensibilities, Lemon’s foray lands as a blueprint that Madeline Johnston of Midwife should perhaps consider. While Johnston’s tracks continue to be blanketed with effects, obfuscating a central voice/persona, Lemon’s track is more translucent (yet still abundantly mysterious). When she offers the phrase, “in the wanderings of my nothingness”, the band’s MO complements, in fact highlights her tremulous delivery rather than eclipsing or competing with it. “Foolish and Fast” is a folk-rock gem bolstered by Reid Magette, who contributes an assortment of rhythmic licks and melodic flourishes.
“Crow”, too, is a simply rendered and moodily catchy piece, Lemon’s voice relaxed yet compelling. As the song progresses, splashes of distorted guitar add texture, Lemon referencing a “ghost town” where crows “rest their necks and nest their young”. Lemon and Farrar eschew the pastoral, conjuring a kind of wild-west Eden or post-apocalyptic wasteland that is beginning to regenerate (consider the biodiverse landscape of Chernobyl 38 years after the disastrous reactor explosion). The guitars on “Slipknot” are chorus-washed and slightly echoey, creating a crystalline space within which Lemon explores relational ambivalences, anticlimaxes, and possibilities.
The closing title song launches as an acoustic-based study of intriguing if slightly surreal details (“old man howling / laughing his teeth out”; “a tree fell I smell the wood”), then segueing into a reflection on marital uncertainty (“the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me”). Lemon plants one foot in a dream-world – pondering a scene and her life as they appear – and the other in a more volatile realm where she gropes for equanimity but tilts toward agitation. Instrumentally, the track moves from acoustic strums to mercurial blends of percussion, trebly guitars, and glitchy effects, the album ending on a relatively austere yet subtly charged tone.
Watch Me spotlights Lemon as she, aided by Farrar and various talented musicians, embraces a robust sound and an integrated vision of life – the striving, the letting go, the worrying, the surrendering. Lemon is also notably versatile when it comes to “presencing” herself, experimenting with confident stances and, on the other hand, self-erasure. She illustrates the romantic dilemma: we ache to self-actualize yet are cognizant, at least on some level, that self and its concomitant pursuits/demands are what weigh us down, inhibiting us, thwarting our union with another person, nature, God. Watch Me brims with stirring anthems, as Lemon questions who she is, where she is, and what, if anything, needs to happen next.
