YMMV / Lemon Demon

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The dad from "As Your Father I Expressly Forbid It." Is he a genuinely awful parent behaving in a childish way and blaming his child for things they didn't even do? Or is he a normal parent as viewed by a rebellious teenager vastly exaggerating how nagging he is?
  • The narrator of Aurora Borealis. Are they in some kind of time loop, reliving the same world-ending Christmas Eve over and over? Or are they just deeply in denial, ignoring the end of the world and lying that they’ve been in nights like this “tons of times”?
• Crack Pairing: For a brief period of time, the ship known as "Game Theory" was quite popular, which was a ship between the conspiracy theorist narrator of Touch Tone Telephone, and the titular Cabinet Man. The latter, by the way, is an arcade cabinet stuffed full of human organs. Yeah...
• Fanon:
  • A popular interpretation of Touch-Tone Telephone (especially in fanmade music videos or animation memes) is that the main character also had a crush on the radio host they kept trying to contact.
  • Although not mentioned explicitly in the song, it's very common for fan designs of Cabinet Man to have "arms" made of wires, likely to explain how he can do things like hurt cheaters and eat maintenance men. The final chorus is also frequently interpreted as Cabinet Man pulling a Taking You with Me on the teenagers that vandalised and assaulted him.

• Growing the Beard: Spirit Phone was a large step forward in songwriting and scope compared to Lemon Demon's more novelty-driven early output. In turn, it was the band's first LP to be positively noticed by music fans and professional critics as a full album, breaking it from its "meme two-hit wonder" status into a legitimately respected synthpop project.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Lifetime Achievement Award" certainly feels...different in the era of using AI generated voice filters to make songs/covers "sung" by dead artists.
• Heartwarming Moments: Your Imaginary Friend is about your imaginary friend coming back after disappearing for a long time.
  Every word that you've learned
  Every wish that you've burned
  Every single strand of hair in your head
  Every book that you've read:
  We love you this much
• Jerkass Woobie: The father character in "As Your Father I Expressly Forbid It" initially seems like a harsh, Abusive Dad, but "I Earn My Life" reveals him to be a stressed father who is afraid of dying without accomplishing anything.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" is probably the most well-known Lemon Demon song due to the popular flash animation based upon it, and "BRODYQUEST" also gained notoriety to the point of receiving multiple remixes and being noticed by the actual Adrien Brody. Two Trucks has also somewhat reached this status.
  • Audio bites from Spirit Phone (and occasionally other albums) are popular to remix in POV videos, often depicting Neil threatening the viewer in some way.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "When He Died," off Spirit Phone might be one of the scariest songs Neil's written due to the Surreal Horror of the lyrics contrasting with the bright and happy instrumentals.
  • "You're at the Party," a bonus track, which (possibly) deals with the listener dying. Neil has since clarified that the song's actually about someone having a fever dream about their neighbor's noisy house party, but that doesn't do much to dull just how confronting the lyrics are.
  • "Cabinet Man," about a man who converted himself into a bizarre human/arcade cabinet hybrid that looks like a perfectly ordinary arcade cabinet. He survives on a diet of maintenance men.
  • "Nightmare Fuel," of course.
• Signature Song: "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" for Lemon Demon as a whole. If we're just talking the songs on Spirit Phone, then "Touch-Tone Telephone" is this by a long shot, followed closely by "Cabinet Man."
• Tear Jerker:
  • Depending on how much you relate, SAD, a song about Seasonal Affective Disorder, can be this.
  • "Indie Cindy and the Lo-Fi Lullabies" ends with Cindy giving up on making music because she thought nobody cared.
  • Early in "Your Imaginary Friend", the titular Imaginary Friend implies that they disappeared when the child who imagined them grew up and that they missed them terribly before the time came that they could reunite.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?:
  • Lemon Demon does have mild cursing and violence in his other works, but is usually pretty family-friendly. But it is surprising when the "Nature Tapes" EP only has 2 non-explicit songs.
  • Spirit Phone also falls under this category, due to how graphic and confronting songs like "Cabinet Man", "When He Died", "Spiral of Ants" and "You're At The Party" can get.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: While the latter half of "Spirit Phone" is pretty evidently about the evils of capitalism, one can make a pretty solid case for several of the songs in the first half having a similar message ("Lifetime Achievement Award" can just as easily be read as a metaphor for a failed Career Resurrection or money-motivated comeback as it is about literally bringing a rockstar back from the dead, and "Sweet Bod", while largely Played for Laughs, is still about a con man defiling a corpse in order to wring money out of desperate people).
• The Woobie: Poor Indie Cindy. She makes music but never lets anyone else listen to it, due to lack of confidence. The song ends with her canning her music project before trashing her basement studio.

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