BLOOD LEMON

The desert often represents scarcity, a place where few signs of life can be found. For the women in Blood Lemon, however, trading their homebase in the high desert of Boise, Idaho for the low desert in Joshua Tree, California would prove to be the right choice to give the five songs found on Petite Deaths their final form.  

“Small bursts of either pleasure or despair,” says bassist and vocalist Melanie Radford of the collection comprising Blood Lemon’s sophomore release. “I think what came out was something eclectic and mystic,” she added. Using the seemingly scant resources of the Mojave, Radford, guitarist and vocalist Lisa Simpson, and drummer/percussionist Lindsey Lloyd, culled together their strongest set of songs to date. 

Working alongside esteemed fuzz lord Dave Catching (Desert Sessions, Queens of the Stone Age, earthlings?) at the storied Rancho De La Luna studio, the band treated the sessions as a retreat rather than a routine visit to a recording studio. To make the most of the time away from Boise, the band stayed in an adjacent bungalow on the property, seizing an opportunity to “briefly get away from distractions in our immediate lives,” says Radford. 

Blood Lemon, a mainstay of the Boise scene despite Radford’s recent move to nearby Seattle, received plenty of praise for their eponymous debut released in the throes of the pandemic. NPR Music, A.V. Club, SPIN, and other outlets of repute lauded their debut that garnered comparisons to other beloved female-fronted influences like Sleater-Kinney and The Breeders. Following celebrated appearances at Treefort Music Fest in their hometown as well as dates supporting avant-garage heavy hitters The Shivas and viral goth-punks Vision Video, the band crafted a collection of songs with widened emotional registers when Radford was on break from serving as the current bassist of indie stalwarts Built To Spill. 

While the songs on Petite Deaths are, no doubt, less overtly political than the band’s debut LP, they are no less provocative. The record’s opener, “High Tide,” explores Simpson’s fascination with “concepts around sensuality and completion” and “what other languages and cultures called an orgasm.” Echoing the aforementioned Breeders’ penchant for blending distorted guitars with entrancing female vocals, the track provides plenty of overdrive alongside lyrics that speak to our animalistic tendency to seduce and be seduced. Thoroughly couched in metaphor, Simpson’s lyrics might still pass as classroom-appropriate in her new role as a teacher at her daughter’s elementary school in Boise. 

Other songs on the collection put Radford’s ethereal vocals and erudite bass playing on full display, often branching out into new territory. For example, “Her Shadow” was “an experiment on how to collaborate differently,” says Radford of using Lloyd’s pre-written lyrics as a basis to develop melodies and chords around. A sludged-out reworking of Jessica Pratt’s “Mountain’r Lower” also gives plenty of room for the band’s psychedelic and more other-worldly influences to shine through. With searing lead guitars and pulsing rhythms, the collection’s first single, “Perfect Too,” offers a scathing critique of contemporary culture’s tendency to sell perfectionism without any promise of moral salvation.   

“Mudlark,” another song with Simpson’s voice at the forefront, is equally full of wonder. Inspired by Scottish actor Sam Heughan’s review of Mudlarking, a novel by Lara Maiklem, the song explores the theme of scavengers who meander riverbanks for hidden treasures. An “unabashed” fan of Heughan’s work as an actor and author, Simpson gravitated towards imagery in his review of the novel, and in her words, of “a person being a possession that ends up being tossed away, and hidden beneath the surface of the riverbed.” The result, an expansively melancholic track that crescendos into one of the band’s signature dirges toward the end of its six-plus minutes of runtime, exhibits how the band can hold an audience’s attention with songs longer than those conforming to traditional radio formats. 

Beyond the expansiveness of the desert influencing the sonic landscape of Petite Deaths, birth also became a central component of the album’s creative force. Following the recording sessions, Lloyd soon learned that she would be expecting the birth of her first daughter, Zenith. Lloyd’s dedication to the band was underscored when the band performed a show in the winter of 2023 in the last weeks of her pregnancy. Well aware that scheduling any major life decisions while playing in an active band can be difficult, Lloyd notes that “the timing of making the record couldn’t have been better.” 

As the final notes fade and captured sounds of coyotes howling in the Mojave fill the silence, the listener is immersed in the stark beauty of the desert and the transformative power of collaboration. Petite Deaths is a testament to how these three women continue to invent – and reinvent – themselves through a shared love of song and embracing change with resourcefulness. The album stands as a powerful statement, echoing with the vastness of the desert and the intimate journey of creation, both musical and personal.