Perhaps I'm missing something. The sixth LP from Lambchop, everyone's favorite Nashville-based quatuordectet (fourteen members-- look it up!), has been released to generally positive murmuring from the bespectacled intelli-rock crowd. To me, this indicates that Kurt Wagner and his Nashville friends have joined that exclusive herd of sacred musical cows, alongside their pals in Yo La Tengo. In the eyes of critics the world over, they seem to have been deemed untouchable.
Which is why I feel like I'm going to have my Music Critics Union (Local #462) card revoked when I say Is a Woman is a disappointment. But before you lay down your harsh punishment, oh wise union magistrates, allow me to present the evidence for the album's underwhelming effect upon your humble supplicant.
I generally like Lambchop quite a bit. Their last two albums of new stuff, 2000's Nixon and 1998's What Another Man Spills, collected genres like baseball cards and created an easy listening sound that soothed the soul without triggering the gag reflex. As the band's makeshift orchestra performed horn and string swoops worthy of a Vegas-style lounge revue, Wagner's lyrics and off-kilter vocals provided just enough of a wink to indicate we were all in on the joke, and that it was okay to enjoy the music of our grandmothers. (Hey, remember irony?)
But from the Vince Guaraldi-like instrumental intro of Is a Women's opening track, "The Daily Growl," it's apparent that the keyword for this outing is "sparse." Fourteen people (twenty, if you count guests) have never sounded so quiet; throughout the album, Lambchop sounds less like the orchestra from "Name That Tune," and more like a piano jazz group whose drummer took the night off. Gone, for the most part, is the genre-hopping, the falsetto, the lushness, and the cornet. Dear God, why the cornet?!
Dangerously, the new sound would indicate that Wagner is taking himself a whole lot more seriously this time around, to less entertaining effect. While his lyrics still have the ability to provoke many a double-take (by the second song, he's already name-dropped Chicken of the Sea, Intel, and Sherwin-Williams), the delivery is considerably more straightforward: less faux-crooner than actual crooner. Wagner's aspirations to being the Dean Martin or Bing Crosby of indie rock have never been more obvious, and it's further made clear by the disturbingly high prominence of his voice in the mix (think Mark Kozelek on Old Ramon or Bridge).
The rest of the band, meanwhile, is largely relegated to the background or the occasional flourish, with the exception of Tony Crow's frequently front-and-center piano. Admittedly, the sparing use of Lambchop's formerly characteristic orchestral sound is often striking: the honking baritone sax sprinkled into portions of "The New Cobweb Summer," the softly resonating vibes and quivering Moog of "Caterpillar." Also nice is the variously filtered angelic chorus answering Wagner's na-na's on "I Can Hardly Spell My Name," and the sudden drop into lite-reggae halfway through the album-closing title track.
But the listener has to work through a great deal of less stimulating material before reaching these worthwhile moments, with most of the eleven tracks running at least five minutes. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of significant drumming or percussion until the album's eighth track stretches the prolonged lull of "My Blue Wave" and "The Old Matchbook Trick" even longer. With little rhythm to anchor songs of such epic length, they much too easily float off into the atmosphere.
Most tragic, though, is the startling uniformity of the album. Save the stop/start strut of "D. Scott Parsley," Lambchop has stripped away much of the country and soul influence that made previous work so hard to categorize. What's left is a polished and subtle jazz-based sound that's hardly bad, but hardly good for more than intense bedroom headphone sessions or wine-and-cheese parties.
A small ass-covering caveat: Is a Woman sounds threateningly like a "grower" album, the kind that suddenly clicks on the 108th listen as genius on the par of Pet Sounds, Loveless, or apparently, that new Trail of Dead album. If this is indeed the case, I'm sure I'll soon be run out of Criticsville by a torch-bearing mob, this embarrassingly short-sighted review preserved for all eternity in the Pitchfork archives. Until that day, however, I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.
