So there’s a fortysomething guy sat on his porch with a laptop and some
cigarettes. His days are filled watching the birds and insects in his yard,
waiting for his wife to come home, and keying in a few lyrics. Pretty idyllic,
by the sounds. And it is, really, except sometimes he feels unaccountably sad,
and is so embarrassed by it he can only confess his emotions to his dog. Then
write a song about confessing his emotions to his dog.
Hardly the stuff of insurrectionist rock’n’roll, perhaps. Yet it’s hard to think
of another album like ‘Is A Woman’ – Lambchop‘s seventh – that makes contentment
sound so compelling and oddly radical. The dozen-odd players Kurt Wagner has
gathered around him in Lambchop are often seen, erroneously, as part of the
workmanlike alt.country scene. In fact, Wagner has guided his troupe to a much
less quantifiable sound, influenced as much by his art school background,
avant-garde ambience and Memphis soul as by the country music of his Nashville
home.
And though it may be tough to categorise, it’s proved surprisingly successful,
with 2000’s excellent ‘Nixon’ even featuring a minor anthem in ‘Up With People’.
‘Is A Woman’, however, feels like a reaction to encroaching fame. For a start,
it’s almost unfeasibly hushed, 11 long songs built around cocktail-hour piano
flurries, non-committal strums, Wagner’s warm, quizzical voice and, seemingly,
not much else. But listen again, and the detailing starts to emerge: a backdrop
of warping guitar and studio effects, all wind and whirr, that sounds as if the
microphones have just picked up Kevin Shields messing about in the studio next
door.
It’s a brave and curious record that, as on ‘Bugs’, occasionally resembles
Willie Nelson fronting Labradford. And that sensation is heightened by Wagner’s
astonishing performance. These are songs about the harmony of things – not least
his own relationship – which contradict the usual rule about trauma and
dysfunction inspiring the best art. Again, it’s all in the details, in the
skewed but meticulous way Wagner unravels his tales. A night on a tourbus with
Embrace‘s road crew is, in ‘The Old Matchbook Trick’, an excuse to examine the
unsteady connections between a musician’s life and reality; nebulous melancholy
shared with a dog can, in the outstanding ‘My Blue Wave’, become a moving
exploration of the often tangential relationship between mood swings and real
tragedy.
Two hokey minutes right at the end, when the title tracks slopes into a bad Bob
Marley pastiche, spoil the mood a touch. But ‘Is A Woman’ is that rarest of
things – a record that, for an hour, makes the wild and dramatic seem strangely
limited. Forget ‘Quiet Is The New Loud’: today, even quieter is the new quiet.
John Mulvey