LAMBCHOP - Damaged

Lambchop can easily be called an institution of nineties indie music. Kurt Wagner's smooth baritone, the grace of the arrangements, and the purity of his songwriting have made him one of the greatest songwriters around, perhaps only a notch below the true giants.

Their last album, "Aw C'Mon/No You C'Mon", was a kind of self-celebration, a highly enjoyable double album centered on melody and pleasure. That record, however, was by no means the close of Wagner's career, who returns in 2006 with "Damaged", ten compositions in which Lambchop — moving on from the alt-country roots they started with and the pop-rock they later reached — bring yet another variation on the theme (formal rather than substantial), giving life to songs that are less immediate, more intangibly classy, more introverted, with orchestral arrangements used in a classic way.

This is probably due to the fact that "Damaged" was born out of the emotional wake of personal events experienced by Wagner (which he himself described as "deep, dark and heavy"), ending up as one long stream of consciousness, helped along by its unique sound, built on the author's warm spoken delivery, delicate accompaniments, and the moving instrumental touches that bring the songs to life.

The album opens with a minute of electronic thread that swirls to embrace the acoustic instrumentation and flows into "Paperback Bible", an intimate, precious melody over gentle guitar arpeggios and piano notes, with violins flooding in waves into the track, stretched out over nearly eight minutes.

The linearity starts to waver almost immediately, right from "Prepared [2]", just as beautiful but more tremulous and unsure in its progress, repeatedly pulled back to the surface before sinking into the abyss by orchestral inserts. "The Rise and Fall of Letter P" instead takes a step back, halfway between the fresher atmospheres of the previous album and the restless mood of "Damaged"'s opening tracks, shimmering and jovial, with the first hints of country and horns.

The country remnants take shape in "A Day Without Glasses", where gusts of slide guitar alternate with quick, sparkling little arpeggios. It's the dress rehearsal for the album's peak, "Beers Before the Barbican", in which the wonderful, reflective guitar figure converses with intrusions of horns and faint electronic lasers.

"I Would Have Waited Here All Day", graceful and pleasant, and the fine "Crackers", propelled by a bass line that's just slightly bouncy, with invading mellotron, ease off the intensity a little. "Fear", with its blend of piano, guitar and double bass over drum hits, embraces its fears with quiet calm, while "The Decline of Country and Western Civilization" closes the record with a succession of violent (relatively speaking, for Lambchop) explosions that feel a lot like liberation.

And so "Damaged" comes to an end.

Listening to it is anything but easy, in fact it's rather tough going, and perhaps the album is too turned in on itself to be fully brilliant, but it rewards the effort by lavishing, as always, joy of living and well-being.

Changing something in order to change absolutely nothing.

In short: another typically great Lambchop record.

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28/06/2006