"The rest just needs a rest," Wagner sang on FLOTUS, capping a summary of people who settled into something less than what they wanted to be, only to calcify. In recent years, advancing age has been the axis of that otherness. On the other hand, he has always written about feeling perennially out of place, whether with the slick city that's made him an outcast at home or with a world that wants something - a hook, advice, simplicity - that he can't offer. Though he is a singular singer with an instantly identifiable voice, he has led Lambchop with a kind of ageless flexibility, never hardening into a single sound. The better question, though, might be what sort of music the band doesn't play, because there seem to be so few answers, only interests Wagner has yet to pursue. Wagner has often been asked just what kind of music Lambchop plays, and he has made a winking cri de coeur of lamenting how "country" tends to stick to Nashville artists as a default assumption. There have been demented trips to Broadway, lysergic sojourns into electrosoul and extended stays at the fringes of indie rock. Casualness and camaraderie have since defined his restless collective, which once sprawled to a two-dozen-piece orchestra but was rather recently a compact duo. Trained as a painter, working odd jobs around his Nashville hometown, Wagner began writing songs in the late '80s simply because his motley crew of musician friends needed something other than covers to play. Indeed, Lambchop has always been an expression of absolute possibility, and one of the most inspiring institutions in American rock for it. Ancient words rock version full#It is a moment full of possibility, even if that only means one more aimless conversation with an aging parent. But the effect is like walking through a cramped, dusty closet of cobwebs only to emerge into some lush garden, a colorful riot of life. They don't talk about much, Wagner and his pops they're just "waiting for a place to fill" with chit-chat. The orchestra rushes in, suddenly triumphant: Harps dance around skywriting strings, while trumpets proclaim squiggling fanfares over clattering drums and a bass line so thick it sounds exactly the way your heart feels after surviving some surefire catastrophe. Then, he flips on the lights - and his dad rouses. As he surveys the room through the first whiff of sadness, two heavy piano chords repeat after each line, demanding to know what is happening. "The light in there was barely there." Wagner describes a paralyzing scene: visiting his nonagenarian father at home, and finding him so deep in his chair he appears dead. "The room was warmer than it should be," he sings. A brooding overture of strings and horns rises, tightens, and then breathes, leaving only Wagner's scarred oak of a voice above a frigid drone. There is now no better Lambchop gambit than "His Song Is Sung," the transfixing and half-tragic masterpiece that begins the band's best album in a decade, The Bible (out Sept. "Whoever said I had the answer / They don't live here, next to the house of cancer," cooed the then-58-year-old cancer survivor, his shrug so complete it seemed to stretch for miles. Four years later, FLOTUS began with a 12-minute meditation on not knowing anything, Wagner's ultra-processed baritone drifting across subtle dub like a ghost. M with trilling strings and twinkling piano as though Sinatra himself were about to stride to the microphone, only to have singer and songwriter Kurt Wagner curse his way through the first verse like an exasperated parent. There were the softly sung fighting words of "My Face Your Ass," a stately soul song as slow as some ancient Southern river, on 1997's Thriller, then a countrypolitan waltz through a wild maze of wordplay on the 2000 breakthrough Nixon. Lambchop records almost always begin with the musical equivalent of an interrobang - a moment so simultaneously surprising and uncanny, you have little choice but to keep listening and hear how it resolves. Kurt Wagner performs with Lambchop in September at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
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