by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
The Lentils stand in a league of their own, it’s an undeniable fact of the last decade. While once best known for Happy Jawbone Family Band, Luke Csehak has been focused on The Lentils for far longer than any other project, releasing new records nearly every year since the project’s formation back in 2014. Based in Los Angeles (via Brattleboro), Csehak has welcomed a rotating cast of collaborators and friends into the fold, bringing a ramshackle sense of freedom to songs that pair philosophical depth and a wry sense of humor. Their lo-fi junk shop folk is delivered warts and all, the earnest nature and fragility of the recordings an unmistakable part of the project’s charm. Where UFOs Fear To Tread, the band’s latest album (out via Moone Records and People’s Coalition of Tandy) captures the natural beauty and aural dust of Csehak’s home recordings, vibrant and brilliant, exceeding loose, lyrically profound, and yet never all too self serious.
Album opener “That Living Edge” sets the tone, a front porch ease and blunted twang informing The Lentils’ garage folk sound, slow dripped with psych pop and art rock expanse. It’s a lush but fractured composition, weaving around a mantra like refrain (“I don’t need it no more”), the cyclical repetition of the hook embedding itself to an otherwise free flowing landscape. The video, directed by Csehak and Madeline Rose Carter is equally wonderful and delightfully strange, a “Lentil-pilled” trip that only gets more surreal as time passes and the “drugs” take hold. There are puppets, shower caps, Csehak dressed as the oddest pill man you’re bound to see, drums played with salad serving spoons, and so much more, which is to say that sense of joy is palpable.