Let's see: A release date one month before the presidential showdown, an album named after the electoral-vote caboodle that Diebold "delivered" to Bush in 2004, a cover-art painting called "New Orleans Police Beating", and a concluding rendition of a 1970 jam rhyming "gasoline's in short supply" with "the rising cost of getting by": This Nashville collective has finally up and gone politico, right?
Naw, c'mon: Frontman Kurt Wagner would never be so gauche as to risk such a banal, linear message. He leaves his audiences to discern (or project) trails and patterns among the far-flung crumbs of his intentions. The release date probably has more to do with September 19 than November 4 (or September 11, for that matter), since a featured track is "National Talk Like a Pirate Day", and besides, the majority of Lambchop platters register as autumnal-to-wintry. The artwork was chosen to provide synergistic exposure to Wagner's grad-school mentor Michael Peed, and anyway, its naked lovers (like Wagner's lyrical personae) are choosing the balm of their mutual absorption over engagement with the brutal complications outside. OH knows that the bedroom, and one's interior landscape, provide the true battleground states.
As for covering Don Williams' dopey "I Believe In You"-- well, Wagner has always loved that kind of cool-less country, and stylistically, OH is kind of a Lambchop Legacy Revue, revisiting sounds from every long-player in their discography except for the symphonic lounge stylings of that particularly heralded one from the year 2000, the one whose critical static-cling Wagner griped about at the conclusion of his last album. So no wonder this acutely variegated disc ends with an almost too-lackadaisical take on a tune dating back to a certain unpopular administration: As his listeners suffer through the last days of Bush, Wagner's still got Nixon fatigue.
The man's vocals never fail to pique. Perhaps more than ever before Wagner belts here as if accompanying-- and equaling-- a master with either a distinct mode or a legendary range. You know, like, in my brains, I'm a dead ringer for Chet Baker while a Chet Baker album is also playing, but solo, my mimicky breathmatazz comes about as close to Chetness as Wagner does to sirs Orbison, Como, Redding, and Kristofferson, from whom he seems to be taking enunciatory, respiratory, and time-management cues. He mostly sells it, though, and one dreams of being able to witness some sort of cross-sectioned live-action sonogram of his upper body, with a karaoke ball revealing from where in his gut, gullet, or jowls he is making those unconventionally expressive noises: the deep whispers, wobbly sermons, and bothered whines, often within a single verse.
Lyrically, Wagner's found ways to self-deprecate and hold forth about the failure of utterance without handing critics hammers with which to bonk him. (Recent offerings almost always contained at least one track so self-consciously frustrated with articulation that it begged the question, "Then dude, why not stop yammering?") Longtime fans might even find him curiously sober, profanity-free, and un-ornery; it's not difficult to imagine Wagner's former fussbudget selves being embarrassed by some of this album's almost cheerful pleas of devotion.
Witnessing the tension between Lambchop's linguistic splatter-painting and the deliberateness of the musicianship is, as always, a blast. Wagner sort of punk'd producers Roger Moutenot and Mark Nevers into recording rival drafts of the album, and then he chose his favorites. Um, Moutenot kills it: His tracks capture and emphasize every dynamic of the performances. The guitars are slapped and scraped, but retain their fluidity. The drums and keys serve as atmospheric lectures for Daniel Lanois on how to occasionally turn some levels down, while "Popeye"'s coda is pure kinetic-but-dour sophistication, making me wish that Lambchop would tutor Jeff Tweedy not only on penning panoramic miniatures, but on when and why to art-rock responsibly.
"Popeye" also has me thinking that Wagner is contemporary music's Robert Altman, from his comfort with starless ensemblery to his disinterest in conventional "impact." Each new Lambchop record glacially redefines the maturity of the previous one, but Wagner's the rare cult leader unpreoccupied with recruitment, and I could see folks being nonplussed by an act for which meandering is the point, and who essentially make no-stakes high art. (Plus, penultimate cut "Close Up and Personal" may tragically be the first to succumb to the Lambchop paradox-- I love me some dissonance, but that arrangement is just too pretty for Wagner's clipped honk.) Consider OH the "most Lambchop" of Lambchop releases, as it swings through almost every tone in the band's history of influence-collisions, arriving at a soul of its own.
