Lambchop
Flotus

If there's one thing Kurt Wagner absolutely doesn't need, it's a flood of auto-tune on his voice.
I still remember when I first listened to “Is a woman”: it felt like listening to Barry White after a course on stylistic manners and a round of tranquilizers. A voice capable of unlocking the driest hearts.
Yet Flotus (For Love Often Turns Us Still), the new Lambchop album, is completely permeated by this much maligned technique.
A practice that starts as a joke, eventually becoming the aesthetic hallmark of the new American hip-hop school, that of Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West. T-Pain even made a pretty grotesque app out of it years ago. For years I have been pondering this blessed auto-tune, which over time I have defined, in a bipolar triumph: “the real novelty of this contemporaneity” and “good stuff for Neapolitan neomelodics.”

Wagner has decided to give the first truth a chance and maybe, for the first time, we find ourselves dealing with this transmigration from the rap scene, always looked at as a sort of second-rate stuff, to pure songwriting.

Pure songwriting that doesn’t lack, as always, the intimate and the political (if you have a politically active wife, it's almost a given). Words are never tossed around randomly.

Wagner and company certainly do not abandon the soul aspect, always rooted in their musical expression, and they don't resort to the artifice of auto-tune as an accessory vocoder or as a prank to center on just one track. The album is all like this, with a more concise and less dispersive poetic form.

And doing it like this, it's the Lambchop, a band always acclaimed for their pertinent approach to music and musical exploration.
We're not talking about chart-toppers like Katy Perry or the Cher of Believe, but about people who have little to learn when it comes to musical competence.
Flotus, for these reasons, for its approach to production, for the choice of sounds and harmonies, is the album that – finally – lets us infer that music, in 2016, is not just a tragic sniff sniff on the beauty that was, but can narrate our musical times. Flotus is a modern album, that can be well-received or not, but it tells of this much-maligned today, and ultimately confirms that hip hop culture was the last of the avant-gardes deserving attention.

Mention to Directions to the Can, a “four-handed” effort with Ira Kaplan (another interesting character) and The Hustle, an eighteen-minute suite that closes the album with a best of what was but, above all, of what will be. Perhaps - and I emphasize perhaps - it's not over yet.

Essential album.