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Lambchop | Is A Woman

A beautful and back-to-basics follow-up to 'Nixon'.
CD, City Slang/Labels

Tekst: Wilko van Iperen

Publicatiedatum: 03 maart 2002

With 'Nixon' (2000), Lambchop have set themselves a high standard. The last release by the band was an accumulation of all previous work until then. Country music from the debut 'I Hope You're Sitting Down/Jack's Tulips' (1994) over the years slowly blended with subtle soul influences and led to the critically-acclaimed 'Nixon'. On this absolute classic album, Nashville country and Memphis soul became one, and the leader of the pack, Kurt Wagner - together with up to 15 band members - managed to create his own definition of alt.country. And although Lambchop always are filed under alt.country, Americana, or whatever, this kind of typology diminishes the achievement of the collective. Their new-found style couldn't be more different than the work of contemporary artists like Will Oldham, who builds upon classic country music (mind you - not your honkytonk, cowboy hat heroes!), while Lambchop just write songs that couldn't be put in any category but theirs. OK, country influences are there, but not as obviously as with other alt.country artists. It's like having the accent of your birthplace that you never lose: No matter how far you tend to move away, you'll always be connected to it. 'Nixon' was, in respect to their earlier work, the logical next step: fewer country influences, more soul, and a prominent role for the Nashville String Machine.

Not unfamiliar with a concept approach of an album ('Nixon' was purported to be an album about Richard N.), Kurt Wagner decided to try another tack: begin and end the album with the same kind of musical feeling. Everything in between had to be a variation of this sound. So, gone are the slide guitars, gone are the drums on most of the songs, and - more surprisingly - gone are the strings. No violins this time around, and - instead of being led by a wall of strings - 'Is A Woman' is as serene as Lambchop could get. Being accompanied by piano (courtesy of Tony Crow) on almost every song, this album is the opposite of the ebullient approach of 'Nixon'. In spite of the subdued sound of the album, more is meant musically than meets the ear on the first spin of 'Is A Woman'. You'd almost think this record is just Wagner, a guitar, and the piano. With this album, Wagner gets you listening real close, and - if you do, only then - this record will reveal itself.

Underneath the stillness of the compositions, Mark Nevers (producer and band member) creates haunting space sounds and quiet noise (Yes, a contradiction in terms, but you listen, and then describe it yourself.). In a recent interview with the three gentlemen who are at the heart of 'Is A Woman', Nevers told KindaMuzik that, during the recording process, "these guys [Wagner and Crow] will just listen to themselves - the main dudes - and the other guys will be beating on bongos out of time in the back room somewhere!" And just because you can't hear the other band members, it doesn't mean they're not here at all. Like Nevers's noisy soundscapes, the contributions of the other men and women are put to the background. The subtle input of the band members, which gives the album a terrifying tension, makes 'Is A Woman' a new listening experience of the Nashville collective.

Between all of the darker-sounding songs, there's the somewhat out-of-place 'D. Scott Parsley', a factious jam with drums in the background. The calm and comforting sound of most of the songs exactly fits the lyrics, focussing mostly on love, death, or life in itself, as you will. "William called and tried / to tell me that his sister's boyfriend has just died / he's not sure what to do / and I'm not sure what to tell him he should do." This painful honesty doesn't only come forward in the lyrics, but also Wagner's intriguingly dark, low voice. And although his way of singing hasn't drastically changed since the beginning of Lambchop, the focus is more on his voice, because everything else is put to the background. The same song, though, starts off in a lighter way: "You lay around the house / nothing much to bark about / jump onto the bed / just bones and squirrels inside your head," which shows Wagner's fascination with triviality and painful reality. Compared with the lyrics on the other albums, 'Is A Woman' is more personal; Wagner turns away from telling stories and exposes more of his own thoughts. At the same time, Wagner's lyrics are serious and witty: "Once I had a friend / who had the knack of tossing / his mind around geography / boy you think, you have problems."

In the interview, Wagner said that he didn't want to sing in falsetto too much, as he did on 'Nixon', because otherwise it could become a sort of trick to get an effect, and that the band wanted to stick to the pure ideas for the songs, because that's what they had in mind: "We didn't have to go through any big pre-production sort of meetings about how it was going to happen." Listening to 'Is A Woman' - and judging by these remarks - gets you thinking that getting back to basics is a reaction to the bigger approach of 'Nixon'. A beautiful reaction, that is. Where will they take us next time in reaction to this new quietness? There's an indication that it will be somewhere under the Jamaican sun. Just listen...