Presumably because the current Nashville musical community refuses to forge a meaningful relationship with alt. country music, mainstream success has repeatedly eluded Lambchop. Always "close but no cigar". Of course, all you music connoisseurs out there will know fine well Lambchop aren’t really an alt. country band at all.
In fact, despite everyone’s best efforts, they defy any concrete categorization, their music wandering freely through Philly soul, folk, lounge, post rock and traditional country influences until the end product is truly their own. Damaged, Lambchop's ninth album, written by mainstay Kurt Wagner, features up to 17 band members and collaborators and is as haunting and as beautiful as anything the band have done in their history.
Kurt Wagner has always had a penchant for the most mundane aspects of life. In album opener "Paperback Bible", a song inspired by a National Public Radio show called "Swap Sho" in which listeners exchange items on air, he sings of wanting “to find a 27 inch color TV/Has to be non working/An RCA ‘cause I need the parts.”
And like always he succeeds in giving this tremendously dull task a sense of great importance, set to a backdrop of hypnotic finger picked guitar, gentle piano splashes and weeping strings arranged by composer Peter Stopschinski who is just one of 17 musicians on show. Quite possibly a metaphor for holding onto life’s essentials and discarding the things the soul can do without, this is captivating stuff.
There are also moments of real wit to be enjoyed. Take ‘I Would Have Waited Here All Day’, for example, where, under the guise of a fed up housewife awaiting the arrival of her husband from work, Wagner croons, “You’re dripping wet from a midday shower/Soon you’ll be drying off your dick/I want to be romantic about it/But there’s really not much more to it.”
But the album’s prevailing subject matter is undoubtedly the sudden realization of one’s own mortality, stemming from Wagner’s recent cancer scare.
This is a guy who has obviously been to hell and back, but as he states on the languid "Prepared", he does not intend to share the details “to their full extent”, which is his way of saying we should live life to the fullest instead of dwelling on the past and playing the victim.
For that alone, Damaged is a life affirming experience. |