From their genesis as an improvisational project within San Francisco’s experimental dance music scene, Lemonade grew to become an effervescing mutation of current music’s explorations and antipodes; their early music drew from new-agey noise, grimey synths, Liquid Liquid rhythms and ecstastic 90′s house incantations. An early experience with Lemonade felt like a gloopy tantalizing pile of Nickelodeon slime; a warm one, pleasantly oozing over their audience’s unified sweating body

Lemonade left San Francisco right before the release of their debut album to Brooklyn, NY, where they moved into a windowless clubhouse, and found a practice space in the basement of an abandoned Catholic school. Formerly allowed to flourish unrefined in their world of SF underground dance culture, moving to New York was a mirror in the face. Their imagination became actuality, and their music became their life, no longer some illusory portal to imagine. They spent the better part of 2009 incessantly touring across the US and Europe, playing everywhere from D.I.Y. punk warehouses to massive techno clubs and festivals. In the midst of touring they recorded new music wherever and whenever possible; programming drum patterns in their van, in the studio they built in their shared residence, D.I.Y. recording setups with laptops and cheap microphones, their friends in Delorean’s bucolic Spanish recording compound, and finally ultimately assembling everything at Brothers Studio.

The songs on this EP represent the band’s journey. The result is an utterly unique take on electronic dance music, this time focused and melodic. This record incorporates more explicit soca, dub, and calypso influences into their existing ravey palate. Even if those sounds are channelled through 16-bit samples and city stories the record has a certain wetness to it- a rich vegetation of sounds. Tight electronic arrangements layered with Alex Pasternak’s fiercely clattered drums, Ben Steidel’s invitingly rubbery bass and Callan Clendenin’s wobbly vocal harmonies float in and out of scope. The whistles of Bedstuy’s West Indian Day Parade ring out in “Banana Republic”, Ballearic synths carress “Remain In Jah”. The EP’s leading track “Lifted” somehow submerges its anthemic chorus and raindrop synths under a deafening waterfall. It feels good. If their debut was citric slime, this EP is an orange; firm and almost uniform in its peel, sweet and wet inside. The songs could easily be swimming at parts, other times floating, but they never drift far from the melodies that carry them. Sometimes they call from a distance like a dolphin’s sonar, sometimes immediate and face to face, excited, smiling. For an EP it travels long distances, and is sure to travel even further in the heads of those that hear it.