There is something so indelibly 1990s about Lamb that you half expect their new album to arrive via dial-up internet to the sound of Lance Ito summing up the OJ trial. The Manchester duo—bloke-ish beat maker Andy Barlow and folky singer songwriter Lou Rhodes—were, for a few months in 1996, the fanciest thing going for British beat heads, their modish sound pushing the trip-hop template into artfully twisted new places. That Lamb never really crossed over was perhaps to be expected. The band’s raison d’être—deviant beats that nodded to the fractured rhythms of ’90s drum’n’bass alongside awkwardly intense vocal delivery—proved their commercial Achilles’ heel.
The Secret of Letting Go is Lamb’s third studio album since reforming in 2009. You could argue that it arrives at a fortuitous time for the duo, with new albums from Billie Eilish and Karen O and Danger Mouse echoing the woozy trip-hop sound of 20 years ago, while the twisted breaks that they once used to spice their pot are all the rage in clubs. So it’s a pain to report that The Secret of Letting Go plays things frustratingly straight.
When Lamb first started out they sounded ever so slightly wrong: There was something gawky about the duo, as if their nerdish instincts couldn’t let a song go without messing it up a little. The Secret of Letting Go, on the other hand, is incredibly smooth, with the jagged edges that once made Lamb so interesting sacrificed for a buttery consistency. The second half of the album, especially, is dominated by gilded piano chords, softly rousing strings, and gently humming synths, which lay a lazy bed for Rhodes’ increasingly conventional vocals.
While there is nothing particularly distasteful about these frappuccino-y torch songs, the cumulative effect is soporific and slightly sickly, like cream on your ice cream at the end of a long dinner. “Silence Inbetween,” one of the worst offenders, is almost shockingly conventional in its approach, the muted piano loops, vibrato vocal and tasteful string bed slipping by with the ease of a feather duster on a waxed grand piano.
Things pick up when Lamb give rein to their more experimental tendencies. “Moonshine” has a swampy bass lurch and diwali-esque dancehall clap; “Armageddon Waits” uses an unconventional 7/4 rhythm and touches of creeping electronic menace; “Bulletproof” suggests a residual interest in dance-music trends, with its jittery dubstep beat and swooping synth line. Best of all is “The Secret of Letting Go,” which pairs a defiant, unwieldy vocal, reminiscent of the Lou Rhodes of old, with a series of angry electronic splotches that shouldn’t work together but do. But even here, the sound is still a shade too pastel to inspire genuine emotional release.
What’s frustrating is that modern audiences have proved themselves more open to the kind of pop experimentation and rhythmic handbrake turns that Lamb perfected on songs like 1996’s “Gold.” Billie Eilish’s recent No. 1 album took generic norms more as barriers to be hurdled than musical starting points, while Kanye West has hardly suffered from a tendency to assimilate avant-garde artistic trends. Lamb, sadly, seem to have lived their career in reverse: too awkwardly experimental when radio craved smoothness; too polished for a modern world that demands idiosyncrasy of our musical stars.
The seeds of a half-decent album are buried among The Secret of Letting Go’s more experimental tracks. But, in the immortal words of another extremely ’90s act, that don’t impress me much. Modern audiences with no notion of the band’s unusual history are unlikely to be moved by this album’s velvety shrug.
