Lambchop preview
Lambchop
Old Town School Of Folk Music, Chicago
Saturday, January 24, 2009
It’s in keeping with Lambchop’s hard-to-define style that the band is both a perfect and poor fit for the Old Town School. Kurt Wagner’s whimsical lyrical prose belongs in a storyteller atmosphere, but the score behind it on the band’s latest album, OH (Ohio) (Merge), is just too broad for the room.
One of the great laughs — among many — on Lambchop’s 10th album is “A Hold Of You,” where Wagner wrestles with a pencil that won’t articulate what he wants it to write. Wagner and band have been confounding scribes in much the same way for more than a decade; the days of being known as an alt-country outfit seem so, so long ago. Once they began stripping away the rules, they injected elements from music-hall, Tin Pan Alley, Jack Nietsche . . . there was probably some Ennio Morricone along the way just to stifle capsule-description. Even The New Yorker was reduced to running a platitude like “one of the most beautiful love songs Wagner has ever written” in reference to Ohio‘s “Slipped, Dissolved And Loosed” — a tribute to Lambchop’s natural but complex existence. Our take? The song’s fuckin’ awesome, dude.
The Paper Hats open.
— Steve Forstneger
Click here to download “Slipped, Dissolved And Loosed.”
Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly
