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. 

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

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.
 
Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

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.

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

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.
 
Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

97. The Hungry Saw

97. The Hungry Saw, Tindersticks (Beggars Banquet UK/Constellation US, 2008)

Nottingham group Asphalt Ribbons recorded four EPs from ’87-’91; their brisk pop jangle just missed the rise of Britpop.  After the band’s move to London, Ribbons leader Stuart Staples reformulated the musical approach, regrouping as Tindersticks.  The sextet debuted in ’92, releasing a handful of singles before delivering an eponymous first LP in autumn of the following year.  The new band’s specialty would be somber, introspective balladry led by the gentle baritone of Staples and accompanied by sumptuous arrangements of strings, brass, and woodwinds.  This iconoclastic stance of measured sophistication in a British era of flashy, frantic noisemaking earned them attention that their previous incarnation’s poppier approach was unable to do.  Three double albums in a row, each increasingly proficient yet demanding, led them to near exhaustion after ’97’s Curtains.  Refocusing again, now bringing soul music into their orchestrations, the group’s next three studio LPs would be shorter, more focused efforts.  By ’03, after six studio efforts and two soundtrack albums, the group once again found itself at loggerheads.  Staples released his first two solo works with no sign of new Tindersticks material, and the band appeared finished.  Invited to play a one-off gig at London’s Barbican in September ’06, the original Tindersticks lineup convened for the final time.  While Ribbons veteran Dickon Hinchliffe and two other Tindersticks founding members departed after that concert, Staples and organist David Boulter found a rejuvenated interest in working together under the old banner.  Beginning cautiously with the joint curation of children’s compilation Songs for the Young at Heart, the pair started work in January ’07, with longtime guitarist Neil Fraser, on what would be the seventh Tindersticks long player.

The Hungry Saw features sixteen musicians; their names, including the founding members’, are arranged alphabetically on the credit sheet as if to emphasize the new beginning; it is dedicated to “everyone at the Barbican on 17 September 2006,” confirming the original lineup’s final concert as crucial to the band’s next phase.  This first record by the refurbished Tindersticks is no dramatic departure from its predecessor Waiting for the Moon (’03); string arrangements once written by Hinchliffe are handled here by Lucy Wilkins and Calina de la Mare, and Terry Edwards contributes brass arrangements as he did on earlier works by the group.  The songs still focus on soulful, orchestrated balladry, interspersed with complementary instrumentals composed by Boulter.  While doubtfully intended as such, the lyrics can sometimes be imagined as commentary on the group’s resilient past: “And still we try/To reach for what has gone behind/But they’re here,” Staples sings in Yesterday’s Tomorrows. “Sometimes I wonder about the turns we took to get here,” Staples sings in the closing number, “but our song is carried on the wind.”  Enduring years of effort in various incarnations, with varying levels of acclaim and energy, Tindersticks closed the Aughts as unlikely survivors.  The Hungry Saw revealed the core trio of Staples, Boulter, and Fraser to possess a streamlined vitality despite those turns they took.  The group sounds more spirited here than it had in years, and it is more engaging than half of its predecessors.  A real case can be made that it is their finest album.

Highlights: Yesterday’s Tomorrows, The Hungry Saw, The Turns We Took, The Flicker of a Little Girl

Sublime bit: The climax of Boobar Come Back to Me, beginning when the backing vocals kick in at 2:08 and running through 3:08.

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

Bubbling Under #103. The Convincer

103. The Convincer, Nick Lowe (Yep Roc, 2001)

The birth of Nick Lowe’s third career phase is well documented. Lowe’s first Aughts release, The Convincer, was his first for indie home for the aged Yep Roc and the third in what he would later dub the Brentford Trilogy, along with The Impossible Bird (’94) and Dig My Mood (’98). With these albums, he abandoned frantic rock and roll and repositioned himself as a gentlemanly balladeer. On Mood, he began shifting his focus from roots music to genteel crooning reminiscent of Sam Cooke; this new style dominates The Convincer. Slinking opening cut Homewrecker sets a misty, rhythm-and-blues tone; its sparse arrangement emphasizes Lowe’s voice, placed high in the mix. The subject matter familiarly relies on gently self-deprecating and optimistic stories of moral failures and deficiencies in love. The man in I’m a Mess believes he will one day “quit this blue address,” but abandoned by friends and lovers he’s not sure when. Between Dark and Dawn advises another jilted soul to “Wait ’til the sun comes out/You’re gonna wonder what the fuss was about.” The bachelor of Lately I’ve Let Things Slide admits, “Smoking I once quit/Now I’ve got one lit/I just fell back into it.” The finest song, Cupid Must Be Angry, has a lush arrangement with a double-tracked Lowe vocal and dazzling treated trumpet solo by Wayne Jackson.  Casual listeners will likely find Lowe’s post-’94 work a blur of the same stylistic ground. Each album is worth closer examination, but The Convincer is the finest; and, as fun as his ’80s work may have been, Lowe’s modern style will undoubtedly have a longer shelf life.

Highlights: Cupid Must Be Angry, Lately I’ve Let Things Slide, Only a Fool Breaks His Own Heart
 
Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.

Bubbling Under #117. At My Age

117. At My Age, Nick Lowe (Yep Roc, 2007)

Pub rocker and prolific producer Nick Lowe ended a five-year hiatus from solo work in ’95; At My Age is the fourth studio LP of his new era and twelfth overall. Over a decade after repositioning himself as a debonair roots crooner, some clamor for the frantic new-wave rockabilly soul man of yore; those familiar with the breadth of his catalog know that it’s his newer work that ages better. While his previous LP, ’01’s The Convincer, benefited from a lush, smoky aura, At My Age is a trim, sharp set of stately skiffle, western-flavored vocal jazz, and an early-’60s country-pop vibe conducted so expertly it suggests Lowe would’ve been at home forty-five years ago in Nashville. An inveterate interpreter, Lowe tackles a handful of country covers ranging from the ’59 Charlie Feathers tune The Man in Love to closing track Feel Again, popularized in ’76 by Faron Young. Lowe’s sprightly acoustic guitar provides a base for most of the tracks, but the most unique aspect of the At My Age band is the horn section appearing on the bulk of tracks. Understated and low in the mix, it nimbly accents the songs, at times adding a nearly mariachi flavor without overwhelming the tunes. Lowe originals The Club and Hope for Us All are the finest here in a run of lovelorn, jovially self-deprecating numbers; People Change features lovely backing vocals from Chrissie Hynde; and the record’s best-known song, I Trained Her to Love Me, is a tongue-in-cheek account of the damages incurred by poorly managed serial monogamy. At My Age may make your grandmother dance, but it’s for good reason. Few artists age as well, and Lowe’s ’00s output is eminently more enjoyable than that of the artists he got famous producing.

Highlights: People Change, The Club, Hope for Us All

Read the NOYOUCMON mission statement here.