Lambchop
This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)
Release Date: Mar 22, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Merge
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Album Review: This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) by Lambchop
Excellent, Based on 5 Critics
Based on rating 8.1/10
There's a trick Frank Ocean returns to throughout Blonde. After smothering his voice with all kinds of effects for long stretches, he'll cut the switch and present his voice naked, and every time it's as satisfying as the first swipe of a wiper blade across a rainy windshield. Lambchop's Kurt Wagner pulls that move just once on his latest album This (is what I wanted to tell you), but he makes it count, waiting until the final track "Flowers" for the big reveal: His natural, 60-year-old voice, treated so completely throughout the album you begin to forget that he hasn't always defaulted to a digitalized croon.
Based on rating 8/10
Lambchop handled the reimagining strategy with rare aplomb on 2016's FLOTUS. Having established a reverential cult following with a gentle country-soul mesh best described as a huge number of musicians playing as discreetly as possible, the record found songwriter and bandleader Kurt Wagner's ruminations and warm conversational tones situated within the decidedly modern frame of auto-tune, locating in the process the potential for warmth and intimacy in a production tool that often stands for lazy shorthand for dehumanising distance and emotional blankness. What could have been an awkward fit up being a welcome rethink of a house style that had arguably reached its peak on 2012's shimmering and sad Mr.
Based on rating 8/10
The time has come to stop calling Lambchop "Nashville's most f*cked-up country band." Given the stylistic breadth and ambition of Kurt Wagner's ongoing project, that designation has long been too limiting, as funny as it may be. But since collaborating with the Nashville electronic duo Hands Off Cuba in 2005 and debuting his side project HeCTA in 2015, Wagner has been distancing himself from the organic, twangy chamber pop that had been Lambchop's stock-in-trade in favor of clean digital soundscapes and heavily auto-tuned vocals. Wagner dove deep into electronics on Lambchop's 2016 album FLOTUS, and 2019's This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) suggests he's not turning back.
Based on rating 8/10
Consistent Nashville-based folk-rock band — and best-of list fixture for over a decade — Lambchop slim down their lineup from 12 or so members to three, and put out eight new "tone poems" heavy on vocal augmentation that read as well on the page as they sound set to subtle lounge grooves. Like many career songwriters over the age of 40, frontman Kurt Wagner has gone more personal, lyrically, and like any rational person in these hopeful, troubled times, his words are heavy on observations and reactions, but short on actual answers ….
Opinion: Excellent
L ambchop are an object lesson in how a band can grow old gracefully. Frontman Kurt Wagner's deadpan observations give them an idiosyncrasy that insulates them from changing fashions, making them too ornery and fresh to fit into the alt-country bracket they could have boringly slumped into. And just as their wry, quietly symphonic songwriting threatened to calcify, they switched it up and - like Stephen Malkmus earlier this month, and so many other mid-life crises in US indie - went electronic for 2016 album Flotus.
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