Artist bio

Lambchop is a unique musical outfit, based in Nashville around singular songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Kurt Wagner and known to include a revolving corps of between six and 20 members, most making their contributions to the band outside of various professional careers.

The group created its soul-country-rock hybrid in the early '90s, releasing dual-titled debut I Hope You're Sitting Down/Jack's Tulips in 1994, but really began to achieve notoriety with 1997's Thriller, which furthered the group's vision through songs like "Your Fucking Sunny Day" and covers of four songs by F.M. Cornog, aka reclusive indie icon East River Pipe. A stronger distillation of Lambchop's influences surfaced on 1998's What Another Man Spills, on which Cornog covers and a trademark version of Curtis Mayfield's "Give Me Your Love" juxtaposed with delicately rendered originals.

But Lambchop's greatest achievements to date are the successive releases of 2000's Nixon and 2002's Is A Woman. The former eloquently fused the band's love of pastoral country music and bombastic, Bacharachian pop arrangements with its classic soul leanings. Songs like the epic opener "The Old Gold Shoe" and "Nashville Parent" incorporated heretofore dissonant styles into silken smooth compositions with evocative lyrics describing country life and the beauty of the average moment.

Is A Woman retreated into quietness with an intricately constructed 11-track masterpiece of lyrical eccentricity and sonic restraint. Songs like the haunting "Caterpillar" and sunset-musing "The New Cobweb Summer" illustrated Lambchop's sound with only a few decibels but many aural shades. Wagner, having finally quit his day job laying floors, drew himself deeper into the Lambchop world and produced his masterpiece.

Albums by this artist

Is A Woman (Recommended) (2002)

Nixon (Recommended) (2000)

Thriller (1997)

Concerts

March 5, 2002
Knitting Factory, New York

Interviews

Double-album goodness
February 26, 2004

Lambchop

Nixon

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» TROY CARPENTER | CO-DIRECTOR

NATN Recommended Lambchop Nixon Merge, 2000 RiYL: Koester, Palace, The High Llamas, East River Pipe

Lambchop's Nixon is like a vivid painting of life. It conjures images and concepts of experiences you may have had, or hope to have, or understand in a more abstract way. While it's not life itself (sometimes Lambchop gets very strange, and life never gets this pastel), it's like a strong memory of life -- it's what we might hope to remember life as being like once it's gone.

Music this laid-back but this deep, so full-bodied and yet so restrained, could only have been made by Lambchop, a unique, fluctuating collective of musicians centered around songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Kurt Wagner, based off his back porch in pastoral and historic Nashville, Tennessee.

Sixteen other musicians contribute to Nixon, which appears to have some connection to former President Richard, but the specific references are obscured to put it mildly. Wagner's songs delicately dance around lyrical meanings: a detailed description one minute, a patently surreal juxtaposition the next.

The music wavers between (and encompasses) orchestral pop, old-style country and spacious soul. The songs are generally built on repeated riffs or motifs, but travel far within their locale, introducing gorgeous string sections, multifarious percussion, guitars and horn blasts, and on "Up With People," a fully arranged choir.

The album's pleasures are numerous, from the slinky groove of "Nashville Parent" to the queer glide of "Grumpus," and it culminates with a frenetic take on the folk standard "The Butcher Boy."

Nixon is a friendly record, and its pastoral feel welcomes listeners in like a squeaky screen door on a breezy late-summer afternoon. Like the glass of musical lemonade you're thirsting for right now.

TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.