Lemon Vinyl’s ‘If Life Gives You Lemons’ – A Music Purist’s Dream Come True

For a minute, Lemon Vinyl‘s spearheading trio, Hakeeb, Dotun, and Deolu have proven themselves as not just aficionados but musical purists. A casual glide through any of the trio’s Twitter handles might bring to notice the wide and distinct musical taste ranging from contemporary folk music to hip-hop, to soul/R&B, to pop, to Afrobeats, and sometimes classical jazz.

Lemon Vinyl, a music/media company, officially kicked off around 2021 by a group of musical heads whose apparent objective was turning their passions into purposeful glee through the elevation of the art that they have come to fall so deeply in love with. Fast forward to 2023, the musical company now takes a huge leap with a seventeen-track debut album titled ‘If Life Gives You Lemons’. The intriguing title leads to the assumption that the ride is about to get strictly philosophical, which it does, but also leaves room for the giddy flenjor and playful themes that further hammer the project’s conceptual mind frame.

The impeccable and diverse lineup of music creatives on ‘If Life Gives You Lemons’ accentuates a nuance that makes you aware of the curators’ intentionality in creating a memorable masterpiece that is clinically reminiscent of culture purists.

‘If Life Gives You Lemons’ truly comes to life in a genius sequence that goes from ‘Lemonade Interlude‘ (feat Kaneki) to ‘Opic’ (feat Daddyluwa). The former, a cascading interlude characterized by a baritone voice-over that gives a mantra that perfectly summarizes the body of work in a runtime that spans less than a minute long: “How does it feel? The journey, the tireless plotting and scheming just to make things different, doesn’t feel too good, does it? Wrong, it feels exhilarating’ all that pressure, all that strife, they have no idea, that it is written in the stars, cause if life gives you lemons take it back”