Lambchop
Is A Woman
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NATN Recommended
Lambchop
Is A Woman
Merge, 2002
RiYL: The Silver Jews, Mark Eitzel, Cat Power, Bob Dylan |
From seductive opener "The Daily Growl" to the closing title track, Is A Woman rarely pokes its head above a snail's pace, even the most active moments are soft when compared to Lambchop's past work in the "rock," "funk" or "soul" categories (only three or four tracks, including the jumpy "D. Scott Parsley," feature audible drums). But luckily, this exercise in restraint doesn't make Is A Woman a boring album. On the contrary, it ushers the group's ever-morphing sound into perhaps its most unique and intriguing phase yet.
The instrumental star of the album is pianist Tony Crow, whose beautifully loose arrangements and gentle touch form the basis of most of the album's tracks. Crow's lines weave through the fabric of each song, fading behind a softly strummed guitar or croaked vocal line here, finishing off songs with an elegant flourish, or surfacing there to take control of a melody when the emotion sputters out of frontman Kurt Wagner's vocals. The rest of the collective (most songs were recorded live by a core group of 8 or 9 musicians) proves itself as adept at milking these minimal arrangements as it was rocking full-scale Curtis Mayfield homages on past efforts. On songs like the deeply gloomy "Caterpillar," the musicians pay amazing attention to detail in their construction of the nuanced sonic atmosphere.
These subdued arrangements allow Wagner to reach out on the lyrics and concentrate fully on what he is communicating through each song, and how (he also quit his carpentry job of 14 years directly before sitting down to write Is A Woman last summer). Wagner's lyric poems reach a new level of obliqueness on Is A Woman, and while that's not always the sign of a talented writer, in Wagner's case, his descriptive powers have grown as well. His well-placed but oddly juxtaposed words translate a series of fractured moments, both mundane and dramatic, as well as ruminations on recondite realms of the human experience like death, nature and communication.
For example, on "Flick," Wagner utters the evocative but highly subjective line "The Dylan and the drugs and the sweat bee / shake and stretch the stiffness out." It could mean just about anything, or maybe nothing at all, but there's an emotion stirring inside those words. With the wispy groove gathering behind his voice, the effect places a listener in Wagner's backyard some recent midsummer's morning, a Dylan record filtering out from the stereo inside the house's kitchen as he lights up a favorite cigarette and watches a sweat bee fluttering about on his chair. You can hear the sun falling just right on the green grass, the amber wood-grain of his lyric-writing desk, and the worn maroon baseball cap cocked upon Wagner's head. He's realizing he has made a decision to reshuffle and reorganize his life, and -- stretching out the moment -- while we might all sometimes take hard turns like that, "start over" and try to create a new vibrancy within ourselves, change can be dangerous if not deftly applied: "Like the chambers from a gun / after all the shooting's done / this is what you have become / now make something of it."
Is A Woman also shows Wagner opening up a lot emotionally, particularly in the darker songs on the record, like the seven-minute "My Blue Wave," where he talks about a friend whose sister's boyfriend has just died. "He's not sure what to do, and I'm not sure what to tell him he should do" -- when Wagner's voice cracks on the second part of that line, you get that empathetic feeling he's drawing from real experience. What would you tell your friend to do? "Sometimes, William, we're just screwed / in my blue wave."
In the album's accompanying press sheet, Wagner says he sees Is A Woman partly as a collection of "closing" songs -- like the tune that perfectly wraps up an album or live performance. Insofar as that's true, it gives the record a weight. Every song introduces itself, presents its particular themes or works through its story, and ties itself up by its end. So in essence you get 11 fully-formed narratives, 11 deftly constructed musical movements.
2000's excellent Nixon allowed musical and lyrical threads to run its entire course, and thus seemed an album of a singular vision. Through a few listens, Is A Woman appears to also fall into this category. But in truth, there are many variations between the similarly forged songs. Though they might all feature piano, acoustic guitar, haunting echo, and Wagner's husky cracked baritone, the focus of each song is quite different -- "My Blue Wave" and its warm emptiness speaks openly about death, whereas its predecessor "The New Cobweb Summer" is one of the gentlest tracks on the record, a contemplation about change in seasons and growing up highlighted by a breezy melody, reserved falsetto cooing in the coda and revelatory lyrics like "the link between profound and pain / covers you like Sherwin Williams."
For all its minimalist musical approach and inherent gloominess, Is A Woman over time proves a creative masterstroke. The subtleties and nuances of texture combine with the entrancing narratives to provide a listening experience that really has no equal. Nashville's idiosyncratic Lambchop continues to impress with each effort, and has reached a plateau all its own on this, its sixth album.
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.