Posted: 28/07
Artist: Lambchop
Title: OH (ohio) album
Label: City Slang
Cat Number: SLANG1051212
Formats: CD/LTD CD/LP & Digital
Release Date: 6 October 2008
Distributor: Republic Of Music
Website: www.lambchop.net www.cityslang.com
So much has changed since Kurt Wagner first led Lambchop out of his downstairs basement where they used to rehearse, at his house in a quiet Nashville suburb. Back then they were a ramshackle outfit, a charming drinking buddy collective taking the music they heard around them in Music City – the butt of jokes amongst the critical elite at the time – and mixing it with the music that they loved, Wagner topping it all off with his weird, abstract lyrics about a “soaky in the pooper” and cowboys on the moon. They were a curiosity: the fact that anyone would want to release the album they recorded as great a surprise to the band as anyone. Perhaps, if it had not been picked up by a small group of fervent fans and critics seduced by what the band archly called ‘The New Sound Of Nashville’, it would have been their only album.
Yet now, almost two decades later, Lambchop return with their tenth, OH (ohio). The musical landscape could hardly be more different. Nashville is ‘cool’ again: Jack White has a home there, Kings Of Leon are a household name, Harmony Korine directs Budweiser commercials featuring Lambchop’s William Tyler and Nashville institution Dave Cloud at Springwater (the legendary dive where Lambchop and many other local bands cut their teeth), David Berman has revitalized his Silver Jews in the city (borrowing two members of Lambchop, we might add) and Be Your Own Pet have elbowed their way onto the teenage punk market.
Wagner is considered a figurehead for local musicians: a patriarch to whom younger artists turn for advice and encouragement. Lambchop are now a part of Nashville’s alternative establishment, an inspiration for the growing independent scene that flourishes alongside the prevalent and rather staid country music tradition. The unique sound that they have refined over the years is now one that artists from around the world travel to the city to replicate with sometime member and producer Mark Nevers: Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy, Tindersticks, Andrew Bird, Howe Gelb and even Candi Staton have recorded at The Beech House, Nevers’ studio cum bungalow. Wagner too has collaborated with a host of successful artists, from Josh Rouse (whose profile as a young songwriter was considerably raised by the mini album they recorded together, Chester) to dancefloor masters X-Press 2 and rising fellow Nashville chanteuse, Cortney Tidwell.
OH (ohio) continues the Lambchop tradition, where each successive record represents a new stage in the evolution of their distinctive sound. It’s a natural process which has seen them progress from their shambolic early recordings on Jack’s Tulips / I Hope You’re Sitting Down to the off kilter pop experimentalism of What Another Man Spills on to the joyful soul of Nixon and then, pointedly, its polar opposite, the piano-led minimalism of Is A Woman. Most recently Damaged saw Wagner leave the porch from which he had viewed the world for so long and start looking inside himself, his dark meditations on mortality and human frailty matched by a band capable of taking delicacy to delicious new heights.
OH (ohio) finds Kurt delving deeper into himself – the songs were road-tested on a Wagner solo tour of the UK and Europe in 2007. The album features a new producer, Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Sleater Kinney, Freedy Johnson), who split duties with Marky Nevers. “This is the first record where I’ve written and picked the songs and chose the producers to make it, then stepped away,” Wagner notes, often employing them to work on different versions of the same songs and then picking the most successful.
Wagner also acknowledges that the fundamental nature of the band itself has altered. “The last five years have been about a distillation of the collective into a core band: Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar), Matt Swanson (bass), Alex McManus (guitar) and now Ryan Norris (keyboards, guitar) and Scott Martin (drums). But,” he continues, “Lambchop more and more has become a vehicle for my songs and myself as an artist. I’ve fought against that interpretation for twenty years, but now I’ve just given up trying to fight it anymore. I am simply going to accept that this is how it’s evolved and leave it to others to define.”
Kurt’s lack of interest in being ‘the frontman’ was one of the appeals that the collective mentality the band championed for so long held for him. Recent releases have seen him shy away from the spotlight by ‘showcasing’ other musicians, most notably Tony Crow on Is A Woman and William Tyler on Damaged. “Marky would say that I was the ‘featured player’ on OHIO,” Kurt concedes, “and he would say it’s about time, too.”
Moutenot concurs that Wagner represents the central figure of this line-up. “My intentions were to cut a live record,” he explains. “No Pro-tools, no moving things around, no headphones: they sat in the same room and played together. I wanted to document Kurt’s song and that band’s ability to embellish the music.”
This time, Wagner has chosen not to highlight the album’s lyrics so as to preserve the integrity of the songs as whole entities, not parts. Of his lyric writing methods, he offers this: “Suffice to say, that from time to time I use ‘found’ content, something I’ve done on and off for years. I use language in a reckless, abstracted splatter of phrase and meaning that somehow comes together through association with the music.”
A perfect example of this technique is the shuffling shimmer of the brilliantly titled ‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’, in which Kurt weaves quotes from such disparate sources as Susan Sontag (“Everyone holds dual citizenship / in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick”) and the poet Shelley (“My song, it’s pinions disarrayed of might, drooped”) to memories of looking at a picture of his wife when she was a small child. “Somehow I weave all this shit into a song,” Wagner offers, with his usual humility.
‘Sharing a Gibson in Chicago with Martin Luther King’ finds Wagner mixing up dream imagery with “real-time-of-writing-the-song observations”.
“We had this late freeze in the spring which killed all the leaves on the trees and all the new grass which made them turn to brown. It looked like autumn in June,” he muses. “I mixed this with a dream I just had of having a encounter with MLK Jr. In the dream we were having a drink together. The drink was called a Gibson (gin and vermouth with a pickled onion). It’s also the name of the type of guitar I like to play…”
Word-play around the different usages of the word ‘stand’ is the premise of ‘Please Rise’, with its sombre majesty, matched by a heartbreaking simplicity.
“I was going to call it ‘Stand’, but Sly Stone got that all to himself,” Kurt wryly acknowledges. “Besides, ‘please rise’ is what they say before they sing the national anthem before ball games here, so maybe it could be a bit of an anthem!” While a vein of humour runs through these songs, Wagner is also capable of unflinching candour, as on ‘Close Up’, where the final line he sings is “I am ready for my close up with the lord”.
Melodically stronger than ever – check out ‘A Hold Of You’’s gentle hook, the slow-mo burn of ‘Slipped Dissolved and Loose’ (featuring Marty Slayton on backing vocals) – OH (ohio) also sees Lambchop’s trademark leisurely pace imbued with a notion of beat and movement, driven by recent recruit Scott Martin’s drumming, most notably on ‘Popeye’’s surprisingly bracing crescendo.
‘I Believe’ is the only cover song on the album, written by Roger Cook, a Brit living in Nashville, and a big hit for Don Williams in the 70s.
“William Tyler suggested we cover it cause it seemed to be somewhat prescient of today and all that, i.e. the rising cost of living. Little known fact – the original lyrics of the line ‘the rising cost of getting by’ was ‘the rising cost of getting high’. Word is that they had to change it to conform to the country conventions of the day. We chose to not go that route.”
OH (ohio) is also a significant step in Wagner reconnecting with a longheld passion for painting. Lambchop has always showcased the work of friends and colleagues on album cover art. However, the striking ‘nipple tweak’ painting on the cover of OH (ohio) marks an important creative and personal reconnection.
“Painting in general has really never left my mind, but my ability to focus on actually doing it had become more tricky. About a year ago I started to really miss the experience of painting,” Kurt says. “There was this painting I started about seven years ago that I finally decided to complete. I just picked up where I had left off. I was drawing the central figure of five debutantes from an all black sorority standing in the woods in Memphis. There was something about this image that was beautiful and personal, since the image itself dates back to when I was living in Memphis in the mid 80s.
“Soon after, I had to stop painting to go on tour. Early on while in Barcelona I reconnected with Michael Peed, one of my former professors from Graduate school in Bozeman, Montana. He was one of the first people to be positive about what I was doing musically at the time in the early 80s. The series title for his new works was Chaos and Tranquility - ideas I also try to use in my music. To me it was personal and poignant, as well as funny, in a cheeky sort of way. So there seemed to be some connection, I thought his work would fit nice with our latest recordings. Something just felt right about putting that stuff together.”
Kurt Wagner will perform solo at End of the Road in September, with Lambchop touring the UK in October.
UK Dates:
Wed 29 October Brighton St Georges Church £16.50 www.ticketweb.co.uk
Thu 30 October Reading Concert Hall £16 www.readingarts.com
Fri 31 October Glasgow ABC £18 www.ticketmaster.co.uk
Mon 3 November London Union Chapel £18 www.seetickets.com 08712 200 260
Tue 4 November London Union Chapel £18 www.seetickets.com 08712 200 260
Praise for Damaged –
‘It’s the work of an enormously talented man creating selfless pleasure from the deepest personal pain’
5/5 OMM Album of the Month
‘CD of the Week’ Daily Telegraph
‘5/5’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Pure Class’ 4/5 Stool Pigeon
‘Damaged is an album of colossal strength and maturity’ 4/5 Mojo
‘A brave, beautiful record’ 4/5 Uncut
‘Damaged is damn near perfect’ Time Out
‘Gorgeous’ 4/5 The Mirror
‘…another breathtaking addition to the Lambchop canon’ The Sun 4.5/5
‘….patently one of the albums of the year’ 4/5 The Guardian
‘It’s an exceptional work of bruised beauty and bitter wit’ Metro 5/5
Artist: Lambchop
Title: OH (ohio) album
Label: City Slang
Cat Number: SLANG1051212
Formats: CD/LTD CD/LP & Digital
Release Date: 6 October 2008
Distributor: Republic Of Music
Website: www.lambchop.net www.cityslang.com
So much has changed since Kurt Wagner first led Lambchop out of his downstairs basement where they used to rehearse, at his house in a quiet Nashville suburb. Back then they were a ramshackle outfit, a charming drinking buddy collective taking the music they heard around them in Music City – the butt of jokes amongst the critical elite at the time – and mixing it with the music that they loved, Wagner topping it all off with his weird, abstract lyrics about a “soaky in the pooper” and cowboys on the moon. They were a curiosity: the fact that anyone would want to release the album they recorded as great a surprise to the band as anyone. Perhaps, if it had not been picked up by a small group of fervent fans and critics seduced by what the band archly called ‘The New Sound Of Nashville’, it would have been their only album.
Yet now, almost two decades later, Lambchop return with their tenth, OH (ohio). The musical landscape could hardly be more different. Nashville is ‘cool’ again: Jack White has a home there, Kings Of Leon are a household name, Harmony Korine directs Budweiser commercials featuring Lambchop’s William Tyler and Nashville institution Dave Cloud at Springwater (the legendary dive where Lambchop and many other local bands cut their teeth), David Berman has revitalized his Silver Jews in the city (borrowing two members of Lambchop, we might add) and Be Your Own Pet have elbowed their way onto the teenage punk market.
Wagner is considered a figurehead for local musicians: a patriarch to whom younger artists turn for advice and encouragement. Lambchop are now a part of Nashville’s alternative establishment, an inspiration for the growing independent scene that flourishes alongside the prevalent and rather staid country music tradition. The unique sound that they have refined over the years is now one that artists from around the world travel to the city to replicate with sometime member and producer Mark Nevers: Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy, Tindersticks, Andrew Bird, Howe Gelb and even Candi Staton have recorded at The Beech House, Nevers’ studio cum bungalow. Wagner too has collaborated with a host of successful artists, from Josh Rouse (whose profile as a young songwriter was considerably raised by the mini album they recorded together, Chester) to dancefloor masters X-Press 2 and rising fellow Nashville chanteuse, Cortney Tidwell.
OH (ohio) continues the Lambchop tradition, where each successive record represents a new stage in the evolution of their distinctive sound. It’s a natural process which has seen them progress from their shambolic early recordings on Jack’s Tulips / I Hope You’re Sitting Down to the off kilter pop experimentalism of What Another Man Spills on to the joyful soul of Nixon and then, pointedly, its polar opposite, the piano-led minimalism of Is A Woman. Most recently Damaged saw Wagner leave the porch from which he had viewed the world for so long and start looking inside himself, his dark meditations on mortality and human frailty matched by a band capable of taking delicacy to delicious new heights.
OH (ohio) finds Kurt delving deeper into himself – the songs were road-tested on a Wagner solo tour of the UK and Europe in 2007. The album features a new producer, Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Sleater Kinney, Freedy Johnson), who split duties with Marky Nevers. “This is the first record where I’ve written and picked the songs and chose the producers to make it, then stepped away,” Wagner notes, often employing them to work on different versions of the same songs and then picking the most successful.
Wagner also acknowledges that the fundamental nature of the band itself has altered. “The last five years have been about a distillation of the collective into a core band: Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar), Matt Swanson (bass), Alex McManus (guitar) and now Ryan Norris (keyboards, guitar) and Scott Martin (drums). But,” he continues, “Lambchop more and more has become a vehicle for my songs and myself as an artist. I’ve fought against that interpretation for twenty years, but now I’ve just given up trying to fight it anymore. I am simply going to accept that this is how it’s evolved and leave it to others to define.”
Kurt’s lack of interest in being ‘the frontman’ was one of the appeals that the collective mentality the band championed for so long held for him. Recent releases have seen him shy away from the spotlight by ‘showcasing’ other musicians, most notably Tony Crow on Is A Woman and William Tyler on Damaged. “Marky would say that I was the ‘featured player’ on OHIO,” Kurt concedes, “and he would say it’s about time, too.”
Moutenot concurs that Wagner represents the central figure of this line-up. “My intentions were to cut a live record,” he explains. “No Pro-tools, no moving things around, no headphones: they sat in the same room and played together. I wanted to document Kurt’s song and that band’s ability to embellish the music.”
This time, Wagner has chosen not to highlight the album’s lyrics so as to preserve the integrity of the songs as whole entities, not parts. Of his lyric writing methods, he offers this: “Suffice to say, that from time to time I use ‘found’ content, something I’ve done on and off for years. I use language in a reckless, abstracted splatter of phrase and meaning that somehow comes together through association with the music.”
A perfect example of this technique is the shuffling shimmer of the brilliantly titled ‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’, in which Kurt weaves quotes from such disparate sources as Susan Sontag (“Everyone holds dual citizenship / in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick”) and the poet Shelley (“My song, it’s pinions disarrayed of might, drooped”) to memories of looking at a picture of his wife when she was a small child. “Somehow I weave all this shit into a song,” Wagner offers, with his usual humility.
‘Sharing a Gibson in Chicago with Martin Luther King’ finds Wagner mixing up dream imagery with “real-time-of-writing-the-song observations”.
“We had this late freeze in the spring which killed all the leaves on the trees and all the new grass which made them turn to brown. It looked like autumn in June,” he muses. “I mixed this with a dream I just had of having a encounter with MLK Jr. In the dream we were having a drink together. The drink was called a Gibson (gin and vermouth with a pickled onion). It’s also the name of the type of guitar I like to play…”
Word-play around the different usages of the word ‘stand’ is the premise of ‘Please Rise’, with its sombre majesty, matched by a heartbreaking simplicity.
“I was going to call it ‘Stand’, but Sly Stone got that all to himself,” Kurt wryly acknowledges. “Besides, ‘please rise’ is what they say before they sing the national anthem before ball games here, so maybe it could be a bit of an anthem!” While a vein of humour runs through these songs, Wagner is also capable of unflinching candour, as on ‘Close Up’, where the final line he sings is “I am ready for my close up with the lord”.
Melodically stronger than ever – check out ‘A Hold Of You’’s gentle hook, the slow-mo burn of ‘Slipped Dissolved and Loose’ (featuring Marty Slayton on backing vocals) – OH (ohio) also sees Lambchop’s trademark leisurely pace imbued with a notion of beat and movement, driven by recent recruit Scott Martin’s drumming, most notably on ‘Popeye’’s surprisingly bracing crescendo.
‘I Believe’ is the only cover song on the album, written by Roger Cook, a Brit living in Nashville, and a big hit for Don Williams in the 70s.
“William Tyler suggested we cover it cause it seemed to be somewhat prescient of today and all that, i.e. the rising cost of living. Little known fact – the original lyrics of the line ‘the rising cost of getting by’ was ‘the rising cost of getting high’. Word is that they had to change it to conform to the country conventions of the day. We chose to not go that route.”
OH (ohio) is also a significant step in Wagner reconnecting with a longheld passion for painting. Lambchop has always showcased the work of friends and colleagues on album cover art. However, the striking ‘nipple tweak’ painting on the cover of OH (ohio) marks an important creative and personal reconnection.
“Painting in general has really never left my mind, but my ability to focus on actually doing it had become more tricky. About a year ago I started to really miss the experience of painting,” Kurt says. “There was this painting I started about seven years ago that I finally decided to complete. I just picked up where I had left off. I was drawing the central figure of five debutantes from an all black sorority standing in the woods in Memphis. There was something about this image that was beautiful and personal, since the image itself dates back to when I was living in Memphis in the mid 80s.
“Soon after, I had to stop painting to go on tour. Early on while in Barcelona I reconnected with Michael Peed, one of my former professors from Graduate school in Bozeman, Montana. He was one of the first people to be positive about what I was doing musically at the time in the early 80s. The series title for his new works was Chaos and Tranquility - ideas I also try to use in my music. To me it was personal and poignant, as well as funny, in a cheeky sort of way. So there seemed to be some connection, I thought his work would fit nice with our latest recordings. Something just felt right about putting that stuff together.”
Kurt Wagner will perform solo at End of the Road in September, with Lambchop touring the UK in October.
UK Dates:
Wed 29 October Brighton St Georges Church £16.50 www.ticketweb.co.uk
Thu 30 October Reading Concert Hall £16 www.readingarts.com
Fri 31 October Glasgow ABC £18 www.ticketmaster.co.uk
Mon 3 November London Union Chapel £18 www.seetickets.com 08712 200 260
Tue 4 November London Union Chapel £18 www.seetickets.com 08712 200 260
Praise for Damaged –
‘It’s the work of an enormously talented man creating selfless pleasure from the deepest personal pain’
5/5 OMM Album of the Month
‘CD of the Week’ Daily Telegraph
‘5/5’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Pure Class’ 4/5 Stool Pigeon
‘Damaged is an album of colossal strength and maturity’ 4/5 Mojo
‘A brave, beautiful record’ 4/5 Uncut
‘Damaged is damn near perfect’ Time Out
‘Gorgeous’ 4/5 The Mirror
‘…another breathtaking addition to the Lambchop canon’ The Sun 4.5/5
‘….patently one of the albums of the year’ 4/5 The Guardian
‘It’s an exceptional work of bruised beauty and bitter wit’ Metro 5/5
