Lambchop seem to roll around the Middle Tennessee countryside like a giant blob, absorbing every musician in their path. Their line-up regularly tops double digits, and on 10th album Damaged, the total comes to 14, including Ryan Norris and Scott Martin of Nashville-based laptop group Hands Off Cuba, who hooked up with the band for last year's CoLab EP. Just as gospel singers gave Nixon its trippy joyousness in 2000, and Tony Crow's elegant piano lent 2004's Is a Woman its studied grace, Hands Off Cuba's contributions, while limited, seem to have determined the shape of this album.
The duo stand out most on the opening track, "Paperback Bible", which was inspired by Swap Shop, an East Tennessee radio program where people can sell anything from tractors to appliances to farmland-- sort of like an Appalachian eBay. Commissioned by Long Haul Productions for a short documentary segment broadcast on Chicago Public Radio, Lambchop's head songwriter Kurt Wagner took the lyrics directly from the show, and the opportunity allows him to consider pie safes and prom dresses as if they're poor Yorick's skull. Hands Off Cuba provide the shimmering intro and coda, a patient fade-in and unraveling fade-out that mimic radio waves but evoke rural dusks.
Unfortunately, the band's work with Hands Off Cuba is limited to just a few songs, defusing the promising potential of combining Lambchop's organic sound with Norris and Martin's synthetic aesthetic. The duo is largely absent from the nine songs that follow "Paperback Bible", aside from one or two brief, superfluous interludes. However, Lambchop does absorb a lesson from Hands Off Cuba: Damaged emphasizes ambience above all else, setting a mood redolent of empty rooms and dusty sills on "Prepared [2]" and rarely deviating from that space. It's a nice setting for Wagner's household poetry, which explores the mundane vagaries of family life. These songs generally depict the everyday tensions that pervade a home following a disagreement or argument, although he rarely specifies the event that inspires each track. Instead he focuses on the fallouts and the small epiphanies that follow, which range from the mundane ("It's been a lousy day," he concludes on "I Would Have Waited All Day") to the apologetically oddball ("I am the most undisciplined of man," he acknowledges ambiguously on "Prepared [2]").
But Wagner is a very disciplined songwriter, and Lambchop are a very disciplined blob, which makes Damaged sound repressed. The music is all pristine veneer, stripped of any trace of the country or soul that marked their earlier material and made them sound like the most involved pick-up band ever. So Damaged is lovely but dull in spots, lacking the fuck-all adventurousness of previous albums. It's not until the final song that Wagner and Lambchop really cut loose. "The Decline of Country & Western Civilization" is a fire-and-brimstone rant against contemporary music that makes Dylan seem like a regular pop enthusiast. Wagner name-checks Nathan Bedford Forrest in the first line (perhaps as a condemnation of Southern rock?), laments that people still think Lambchop peaked with How I Quit Smoking, and remarks that he prefers Jim Nabors to anything this site covers. Lyrically and musically, the song is thunderous and over the top, but after so much restraint, such spirited hostility is a salve.
