Stage whispers
Kurt Wagner’s new meditations and stardust memories. By Tom Doyle.
Lambchop ★★★★ Showtunes CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP
FOR NIGH on three decades, Lambchop have changed like slowmoving weather, as Kurt Wagner, now 61, has grown into his always oaky, now slightly timeworn voice. But if the core sound of his amorphous outfit has been an idiosyncratic kind of country soul, it enjoyed a technological jolt with 2016’s Flotus, wherein softly pattering electronic beats conspired with an overtlyharmonised/Auto-Tuned vocal approach.
That same sound palette continued to create the colours for 2019’s This (Is What I
Wanted To Tell You). Yet once again technology has brought another change, as the making of Showtunes found Wagner discovering how to digitally transpose his guitar onto MIDI piano (and finely edit or generally mess with the parts onscreen). Having built these unusual foundations, he then assembled a new cast of Lambchop collaborators, in Ryan Olson (Gayngs), Andrew Broder (Fog), trumpet/ French horn player CJ Camerieri (Bon Iver; Paul Simon) and James McNew of Yo La Tengo on double bass.
The result is his most freely-flowing album since the sparse and beats-light Is A Woman, although this is a very different sonic world to that one he created 19 years ago. If the title of Showtunes could be at first read as ironic, there are actual hints of George Gershwin’s or Hoagy Carmichael’s melodic sweep in these songs, as Wagner sails his voice over ambient jazz washes and subtle electronics. More often, though, it sounds like The Blue Nile recording for ECM.
The ghostly atmosphere that lingers is aided by the recurring appearance of found voices: a female opera singer floating in and out of The Last Benedict; the cut-up, Walkman-quality soul hook snippets of Blue Leo, or Drop C’s preacher asking, “Are you listening?”, before being contorted beyond recognition. It’s a tasteful, non-showy audio postmodernism that moves Lambchop into new territory and enhances Wagner’s often impressionistic lyrics.
The overarching theme of Showtunes, meanwhile, is one of veering between thoughts of permanence and impermanence. In opener A Chef’s Kiss, Wagner looks around him and decides that “the smell of gas and fresh-cut grass won’t last beyond us at all”, but then namechecks Spanish cellist Pablo Casals to hear “a final note that rings forever”. Elsewhere, Unknown Man finds him hypnotised by an old photograph of a figure with “an Afro and a jumpsuit with pleats”, frozen forever in black and white.
It’s beautiful, meditative stuff, even though this may be a more “difficult” Lambchop, with less in the way of obvious melodies to ground the listener. Initially, at just 32 minutes and eight tracks (two of them instrumentals), it could also seem a slighter offering. But over time and repeated plays,
Showtunes weaves its magic, maintaining its mysterious atmosphere throughout, along with a welcome sense of stillness amid life’s ongoing dramas.