40. Is a Woman

40. Is a Woman, Lambchop (Merge, 2002)

This is a placeholder for an entry to come in my Top 125 Albums of the 2000s, which I selected at the end of 2009. This blog has been dormant since autumn 2010, and my intention is to finish the final 45 entries as originally selected despite the distant vantage point and my opinions having changed in the interim. 

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67. Nixon

67. Nixon, Lambchop (Merge, 2000)

Kurt Warner quietly led his Nashville group Lambchop through the bulk of the ’90s, keeping his carpentry day job while releasing four LPs and one mini-album between ’94 and the decade’s end.  His collective, boasting a dozen or so members from release to release, slowly polished a modest sort of American musical quilt bridging country, rock, and soul.  Wagner’s natural voice is folksy and unadorned with a slight twang; he is capable of lush crooning, though, and from time to time uses a convincing falsetto.  The band’s instrumentation is broad, including piano, organ, vibraphone, strings, horns, and an assortment of percussion; the arrangements often understated, most songs unfold casually at quarter speed.  The music is often elegantly sparse, the ballads complemented by the occasional rave-up and, especially in the lyrics, a mild irreverence all the more striking because of the sedate music.  The group’s first clutch of releases, through the ’96 EP Hank, show a group finding its sea legs; often pleasantly shaky but not without success--2nd LP How I Quit Smoking (’96) is an early high point--their ’90s catalog is a charming set of preparatory materials for the bracing work they would accomplish in the Aughts.

Nixon, the sixth Lambchop record, expands on the developments of its predecessor, What Another Man Spills (’98), which included a faithful Curtis Mayfield cover, Give Me Your Love.  Just as when Porter Wagoner invited James Brown to the Grand Ole Opry, this crossover reveals the continuity between soul and country.  Nixon, in turn, is Lambchop’s soul album.  It swings more than any of the group’s previous work, and Wagner employs a passionate falsetto on nearly half the tracks.  Of Nixon’s soul showcases, You Masculine You and What Else Could It Be are sung entirely in falsetto, the latter with a sleek, mature disco arrangement; shimmering violin cascades are provided on that track and several others by guests the Nashville String Machine.  Grumpus is a grooving, brawnier affair, Wagner’s vocal skirting the rhythm ever so slightly and shooting to the higher registers at the end of the bridge.  The Book I Haven’t Read is even given a Mayfield co-credit, due to its similarity to his ’85 tune Baby, It’s You.  The album’s one single and the band’s only near hit, Up With People, is anomalous in the Lambchop catalog; a pulsing number with a diamond-sharp gospel chorus, its refrain finds Wagner and the choir freely declaring “We are screwing/Up our lives today.”  The album’s finest expository achievement is Nashville Parent.  The epitome of Wagner’s ability for documenting the mundane, it depicts domestic scenes of standing against the kitchen counter with arms crossed, neighbors fighting after a drinking binge, and spitting on the sidewalk but ending up having to wipe it off your shirt.  All of this is delivered in a silky vocal befitting a Johnny Mathis record, the accompaniment the first shining example of the smooth country-soul melange the group would perfect on later albums like Is a Woman (’02) and Damaged (’06; see #90).  The performances and Mark Nevers’s production are leagues beyond earlier Lambchop works.  The accomplishments of Nixon served Lambchop well; the band heretofore largely unknown, Nixon scored them Album of the Year in UK magazine Uncut.  That they would go on to even bigger musical accomplishments is testimony to Lambchop’s status as perhaps the most underrated rock group of the decade.  As for Nixon’s relation to the 37th President, his administration concurred nicely with the rise of the modern soul and disco to which Lambchop pay homage on what is their first great album.

Highlights: Nashville Parent, Up With People, Grumpus, You Masculine You

Sublime bit: When, achingly, Wagner sings the line “You look pretty swell/In your new position” for the second time in Nashville Parent at 4:57.
 
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78. Aw Cmon

78. Aw Cmon, Lambchop (Merge, 2004)

The Aughts began on a high note for Nashville country-soul adventurers Lambchop.  Their ’00 album Nixon was named Album of the Year by UK mag Uncut at a time when the fluctuating confederation of over a dozen members was relatively unknown in their homeland.  ’02 follow-up and somber epic Is a Woman was an artistic breakthrough and their best-produced LP to date.  These albums’ success allowed frontman Kurt Wagner to quit his job laying floors; with his new free time, he embarked on a project to write a song a day.  Wagner still a reticent pop musician after nearly a decade of recording, the project served as a self-legitimization exercise and provided him with enough material for two albums.  In ’03, Lambchop was commissioned to perform a live score to a festival showing of F. W. Murnau’s 1927 silent film Sunrise.  Wagner incorporated his daily songs into that effort, and Lambchop’s ninth album, No You Cmon, would open with an instrumental named for the film.  By 2004, releasing two albums on one day was no longer the dazzling stunt it was in ’91 when Guns ’n’ Roses issued Use Your Illusion I & II or when Bruce Springsteen broke up the E Street Band to unleash ’92 career nadirs Lucky Town and Human Touch.  In ’02, Tom Waits brought dignity to the tactic with fraternal twins Alice and Blood Money.  Lambchop’s UK label, City Slang, released the band’s diptych as a regular double LP with two titles; stateside, however, Aw Cmon and No You Cmon remained two separate entities.

Aw Cmon is the superior of the two albums.  While they are similarly structured, boasting the lushest arrangements of the band’s career to date, uncharacteristically including numerous instrumentals, strengthening their unique amalgamation of soul and the Nashville sound, and operating with a sense of levity absent from their predecessor, Aw Cmon simply possesses stronger and more memorable songs.  No You Cmon is the group’s weakest Aughts effort, an occasionally silly record whose arguable highlight is the quasi-instrumental doo-wop lark Shang a Dang.  Aw Cmon opens with instrumental Being Tyler, starting with a sprightly, mildly funky bassline reminscent of earlier rhythmic Lambchop efforts like their ’98 cover of Curtis Mayfield’s Give Me Your Love before blooming into a breezy orchestral flourish.  Aw Cmon’s other instrumental, Timothy B. Schmidt, wryly named for the Poco/Eagles bassist, is a bouncy, mid-tempo, piano-led pop confection.  Women Help to Create the Kind of Men They Despise climaxes with a slowly chanted vocal line reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s ’67 nutty operetta Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.  “I hate candy/But I like rain,” opens I Hate Candy before gliding into a slinky groove on choruses of “Where’s my little trouble girl/There’s no real trouble, girl.”  Something’s Going On finds Wagner’s voice deeper than ever--going to nearly subwoofer levels on the bridge--his vocals syncopated to the point that they almost function as percussion despite an intricate lyric about anxiety that manages to name check Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles.  The album’s most earnest number, the aching, piano-and-string-laden Steve McQueen, addresses the value of honesty: “Make sure we never ever stand in each other’s way/When you got something that you got to say that’s real/Look to each other.”  Aw Cmon, along with its slighter sister, provides the most fun in Lambchop’s dense Aughts catalog; a playful record, often sensual and occasionally as poignant as their more sober recordings, Aw Cmon demonstrates the band’s increasing virtuosity while remaining true to Wagner’s singular, homespun sense of wonderment.

Highlights: Something’s Going On, Steve McQueen, I Hate Candy, Timothy B. Schmidt

Sublime bit: When Wagner pleads, if ungrammatically, “Take me serious,” 2:48 into Steve McQueen.

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90. Damaged

90. Damaged, Lambchop (Merge, 2006)

A lot transpired for Lambchop and leader Kurt Wagner in the thirty months between the ’04 joint release of the Aw Cmon and No You Cmon LPs and their ninth studio work, Damaged.  The fluctuating Nashville collective, often claiming over a dozen members, had made eight studio albums in a decade, each a progression of their meticulous, elegant update of the ’50s Nashville sound melding country with strings and its ’70s Countrypolitan descendent that subtly incorporated soul music.  In ’05 they released the CoLAB EP, a mutual effort with ambient duo Hands Off Cuba--consisting of Lambchop members Ryan Norris and Scott Martin.  Three of its four tracks find Lambchop tunes rearranged into unrecognizable electronic pieces; this work would figure heavily in the creation of Damaged.  Early ’06 saw two rarities compilations released, both titled The Decline of Country and Western Civilization and featuring different track listings in its US and UK guises.  Most grave, though, was Wagner’s series of health crises including jaw replacement surgery and a bout with prostate cancer.  He recovered, his difficult year informing the typically quotidian lyrics on Damaged.  The album’s inner sleeve features an x-ray of his jaw.

Despite these troubles, Damaged was the lushest, most beautiful Lambchop album to date.  Recorded by their longtime producer Mark Nevers, its sound is more luxurious than that of earlier Lambchop records and is bolstered by string arrangements on three tracks; the songs are linked by electronic interludes constructed by Norris and Martin from samples of the record’s own material.  More subtle than the pieces on CoLAB, they give the album a finespun undercurrent.  Numbering eighteen musicians here, the complex orchestrations of Lambchop circa late-summer ’06 seem to hinge on the understated guitar of William Tyler and the deft piano of Tony Crow.  Wagner’s lived-in baritone is mixed higher on Damaged; on the ’04 albums it was often so low that it disappeared among the accompaniment.  While those LPs featured many upbeat tunes stemming from a Wagner project of writing a song every day for a year, the songs on Damaged stretch out, revealing their more premeditated gestations.  The album opens with its most absorbing number, Paperback Bible.  A literal transcript of a radio call-in show devoted to trading household goods, it exemplifies Wagner’s knack for making the mundane heartbreakingly lovely; Crow’s rationed piano lines appear every minute or two, adding more fragile beauty.  I Would Have Waited Here All Day is a rare male-sung song with a female narrator.  It depicts a woman who spends afternoons at home waiting for her lover to arrive, noting that “The fading sense of anticipation/Is something I’ve come to know”; when he does pull into her driveway, she resignedly concludes “it’s been a lousy day.”  The sole straightforward tune from CoLAB is reprised, here titled Prepared [2], to whose swelling string quartet Wagner declares “I am the most undisciplined of man.”  The closing number, its title taken from the band’s ’06 rarities compilations, is a bombastic, angry survey that takes in the indie-rock blogosphere (“You see your Pitchfork I-rock saviors/And I’m sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors”), Wagner’s health problems, and KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, each verse concluding with the fuming “Damn, they’re looking ugly to me”; by song’s end, the self-deprecating, romantic Wagner has calmed, quietly concluding “And I’m still alone/But you’re good looking.”  Damaged is a striking album, borne of artistic growth and personal difficulty, and a highlight of Lambchop’s expansive body of work.
 
Highlights: Paperback Bible, The Decline of Country and Western Civilization, Fear, The Rise and Fall of the Letter P

Sublime bit: The entirety of Paperback Bible; or, alternatively, Tony Crow’s sparkling piano lines that run intermittently through that song.
 
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Bubbling Under #112. Oh, My Girl

112. Oh, My Girl, Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter (Barsuk, 2004)

Seattle pair Jesse and Jim Sykes led Hominy, whose rootsy girl-n-guy harmonies recalling L.A. rockers X resulted in one ’98 LP. When their relationship ended she kept the surname, forming a new band with ex-Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandscher; in the new decade they would release three albums to increased exposure and success. Sykes’s own material operates on a different plain than titles of Hominy tunes like “Sunny Days and Raisinets” might suggest.  Her husky voice is the focus, despite its dynamic limitations; it conjures a hazy, quarter-speed world of gothic country that rarely swings but frequently allures, a beautiful gloom later earning her a guest slot with doom metal bands Sunn O))) and Boris. On her first solo LP, ’02’s Reckless Burning, the recipe is complete yet cloaked in a drabness absent from her next album and finest work of the decade, Oh, My Girl. Where Burning sometimes plods, Girl captures the zeitgeist perfectly. The songs call upon ghosts and departed lovers, the season is usually winter, and happiness has passed: “We used to be free,” opens Birds Over Water; “We fell through the cracks,” she sings in Grow a New Heart. This wistfulness remains even on the album’s liveliest cuts; the bright arrangements of songs like Tell the Boys and The Dreaming Dead foreshadow the pop-influenced explorations of her next album, ’07’s Like, Love, Lust, and the Open Halls of the Soul. Of her Aughts work, though, Girl best captures her haunting talents.

Highlights: Your Eyes Told; Oh, My Girl; Tell the Boys

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Bubbling Under #116. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

116. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case (Anti-, 2006)

US singer-songwriter Neko Case got her start in toss-off punk bands, later crafting a singular writing style influenced by western honky-tonk but also encompassing soul, torch ballads, vocal jazz, and pop. The clarity and range of her remarkable voice (arguably reminiscent of Linda Ronstadt) makes her one of the era’s most compelling vocalists. After the juvenilia of Case’s punk work and ’97 cowpoke solo debut The Virginian, her talents have grown with every studio effort. Fox Confessor, her breakthrough fifth LP*, is the least country-oriented of her work thus far. The band features members of Giant Sand and Canadian group the Sadies, as well as the Band’s Garth Hudson and Flat Duo Jets guitarist Dexter Romweber. Case’s penchant for evoking animals’ tooth-and-claw nature is evident throughout, and the lyrics brim with alluring details—nightgowns sweep pavement, letters cascade down a staircase, eagles swoop down from semitrailers. A sense of reckoning and the opaque aspects of loss, disaster, and loneliness imbue the songs; when brighter times lie ahead it may be irrelevant, as with the narrator of That Teenage Feeling who “don’t care if forever never comes.” Case’s dynamic voice brings a sense of optimism and beauty to even the darkest moments. Fox Confessor is her first essential album, catapulting her beyond the alt-country ghetto and into songwriting’s big leagues.

*I include live '04 LP The Tigers Have Spoken in that count, as only one of its tracks has appeared on a Case studio album; the '01 Canadian Amp is an EP, not a full-length.

NOTE: Under no circumstances do I recommend the original gatefold vinyl pressing of this album on Lance Rock Records, and it receives a NOYOUCMON "do not buy" warning.  While I generally prefer vinyl to other formats, this first Lance Rock pressing of Fox Confessor is among the rare vinyl albums that I have found to be inferior to the compact disc version.  It sounds as if it were mastered from a digital source—if so, then it defeats the purpose of vinyl altogether—and has none of the warmth one expects from wax.  Additionally, my copy, purchased new, has numerous flaws that affect playback in ways that an untouched 180-gram vinyl pressing should not be affected.  Even casual vinyl listeners may be put off by the poor sound.  If you want to buy Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, please purchase it on compact disc or a legal download.  [UPDATE: Lance Rock has since issued another pressing, in a single-pocket jacket; I have not heard this version and thus cannot attest to its sound quality.]

Highlights: Margaret vs. Pauline; Hold On, Hold On; The Needle Has Landed

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