Lambchop
Damaged

THE REVIEW

"Damaged" picks up the discourse interrupted 4 years ago by "Is A Woman" with what many have judged, in its sparseness and minimalism, as Lambchop's most mature work. The music of Lambchop, which the term "alt-country" only partially describes, rediscovers the path of an absolutely original classicism (forgive the oxymoron, but it really cannot be avoided when talking about Lambchop), where the instrumental dialogue between pedal steel and piano, the delicate incursions of strings and horns, and Kurt Wagner's monotonic (but never monotonous) voice find the perfect synthesis.

In all this, Wagner's poetic and disarming lyrics play an increasingly important role, capable as never before of touching and engaging. Stories of ordinary provinces, of characters somehow resigned to daily dramas, narrated with a lyricism and poetry truly unique in the contemporary music scene. It makes you want to bring up burdensome comparisons, of people who truly made music a new form of poetry, but doing so would be an injustice to Wagner, who has now emancipated himself from the masters and has become himself a benchmark for others. In all this, the song form of Lambchop is crucial, as it is something absolutely new in modern pop music, shunning the verse-chorus stereotypes in favor of much more complex structures that, however, allow the melody and narrative to unfold.

In this new work, Lambchop recovers a bit of the best of their production, combining the softness of "Is a Woman" (certainly the work closest to this), with the more orchestrated and almost pop (perhaps too much) sounds of "Nixon" that won over many but made just as many frown, up to the more conventional country of a lesser work, yet a very fine one, like "What Another Man Spills". There has been talk of self-referentiality and excessive repetitiveness, and don't be surprised if someone, perhaps yourself, on a first listen, thinks it's difficult to distinguish one song from another. It's just that we are accustomed to the sonic conventions of mainstream music, and we are always a bit thrown off by those who shun them. You only need an empty room, a pair of good headphones and 45 minutes of your time, to understand that here we are really on another level. What really makes Lambchop precious is their ability not to disappoint, to be a reassuring certainty in such an unstable landscape. Kurt Wagner and the travel companions he chooses each time have no need to astonish, to chase exotic sounds and new experiments. Because they found their path long ago, never predictable and always surprising in class and elegance.