Damaged

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

Lambchop has had to weather a number of absurd descriptions over the course of their 12-year existence. They've been branded alt-country, indie-jazz and — most famously and commonly — country-soul. None of these tags is accurate, but the fact that there are so many of them gets to a deeper issue with the band, one that arguably has a lot to do with their modest stature in the U.S. The trouble is that no one knows quite what to do with Lambchop, so they either concoct a series of ill-fitting genre tags or, worse, label them "unclassifiable," which makes them sound garrulous or willfully avant-garde.

Which is a shame, because Lambchop's music is beautiful, all thirteen of the group's members dissolving into one softly glowing whole. Never have so many sounded like so few. Each note is perfectly, deliberately placed, like a top layer on a house of cards or a brush stroke on a blank canvas. Starting with 1996's Thriller, their work has become increasingly gorgeous and intricate, culminating with 2004's two-part masterpiece Aw C'mon/No You C'mon. Damaged takes a step back from the grandeur of those records, opting instead for songs with plenty of open space.

Frontman Kurt Wagner remains a kind of musical Walker Percy, using everyday occurrences as metaphors for life's big questions. The songs on Damaged are uniformly obsessed with human weakness. "Paperback Bible" opens with Wagner setting to buy a Bible and ends with him at a moral dead end, contemplating the best way to kill someone. A marriage crumbles from routine in "Prepared (2)" and an awful unnamed tragedy hangs in the background of "Beers Before the Barbican." But his poison pen is deadliest when it's pointed inward. Wagner examines his own generational dislocation in the thundering "Decline of Country & Western Civilization," announcing: "You see your Pitchfork, i-rock saviors/ And I'm sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors." It's an observation that rings with both derision and despair.

Wagner sings in gulps and warbles, and his blunt instrument helps to counterbalance the music's delicate shimmer. It's like a toad croaking on top of a wedding cake. Damaged is a record of quiet wonder, built from sluices of guitar and soft, slight surges of strings, and it requires a measure of attentiveness before it will reveal its secrets. That kind of deep focus can be alienating, but it's also one of the things that makes Lambchop's music so marvelous: glance at the songs and you just see stars — look closely, and see constellations.