lambchop – oh (ohio)
Lambchop are one of the few bands to trigger that weird, obsessive gene that demands I must have their entire discography. But rather than just for completion’s sake, it’s because I genuinely can’t get enough of them.
On their early records, vocalist Kurt Wagner (he could never be called a “singer”) sounds like he’s trying hard at life. He may seem wry and baffled at times, but his voice is clean, even sprightly – check his comically sing-song delivery on ”Gloria Leonard”, or the piss-taking on “Suzieju”. This reaches an apex of confidence on Nixon where Wanger deploys an astonishing falsetto alongside full-lunged melancholy to create an album to which they’ve been marked against ever since.
It’s as if Wagner let out his spry, romantic youth with that record, because his voice has shifted in timbre ever since. Now Wagner delivers his lines like they’re peanut shells being tossed into a bar-top ashtray – stoic, not hopeless, but certainly a little despondent. On their latest record OH (Ohio) there’s a notable increase in despondency just from the last record, Damaged, where Wagner’s voice was deep and weathered but still drawing palpable satisfaction from delivering notes in a soulful tenor.
Now the voice is even deeper, at times incomprehensible, while the band mirrors the moist-eyed strings and jazzily tumbling rhythm sections of Damaged, plus a few new textures, like the brilliant lounge-Muzak in the middle-eight of “Of Raymond” that brings Stereolab to mind.
“A Hold Of You” is my favourite, its centre of gravity constantly skewed by a crushing offbeat in the chorus, and lyrics that cleverly convey the bemusing distance that modern communications technology ultimately creates.
Interestingly the band got longtime producer and member Mark Nevers to produce the whole record, and also Roger Mountenot (who’s worked with Yo La Tengo and others), and then choosing the versions they preferred for the final album. The bonus disc has some of the discarded versions so colossally nerdy ’Chop fans like me can do some compare and contrast:
Lambchop – Slipped Dissolved And Loosed (Mark Nevers version)
Lambchop – Slipped Dissolved And Loosed (Roger Mountenot version)
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