Well, they certainly don’t get any worse. But this should surprise no one. Nashville, Tennessee’s inventive rolling orchestra of droll melancholy, led by the inimitably and charmingly authoritative Kurt Wagner, find themselves here on their eighth studio recording still upholding an enviably classic respect for one’s own standards. It’s a little old fashioned in a way, the attention to detail, like faithfully starching your collar for church on a Sunday, every Sunday, always, but it’s a characteristic full of virtue, full of reassurance. They are not here on a whim and you are in the company of greatness, that much can surely now be guaranteed. And ‘Damaged’ might not be as off the wall or as ecstatic or as far reaching of some of their previous works, but it is warm, personable, consistent and effortlessly rich.
Of course, growing old and labouring slightly is an inevitability for us all – not that Lambchop ever seemed juvenile – but that needn’t necessarily become debilitating where creativity is concerned. Not when experience and literacy are such weighted components. Lambchop tread a very similar trail to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds in this respect, finding not just comfort in the careful, shrouded environs of the minor-key piano ballad, but a solid foundation for the dense, dry, intellectual roots that give flower to the lush lyrical brush above. And having both stretched their seasoned capabilities over similarly intentioned double-albums last time (‘Aw C’mon/No You C’mon’ in Lambchop’s case, ‘Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus’ in Cave’s), Wagner now leads us through Lambchop’s equivalent ‘No More Shall We Part’.
It’s all about his voice, and what it carries – the quivering tongue-in-cheek romance of ‘I Would Have Waited Here All Day’, and the impossibly skilful sepia-romanticising of a classified local radio swap shop on ‘Paperback Bible’. It’s all about the instrumentation; commanding and considerate, delicate and lavishly draped – the lush osmosis between the haze of alt-country multiplicity and warm orchestration on ‘Prepared [2]’. And it’s all really about the closing track, the burgeoning ‘Decline Of Country & Western Civilization’, which is like the sky brewing up for apocalypse after a day of patchy cirrus clouds and whisker-tickling breeze – a sumptuous carnage amid gatecrashing percussion, taut schizophrenic strings, restless guitars and stream-of-consciousness baritone offers a small taste of their avant-garde.
There are no dips with Lambchop. Never have been, and they don’t start here. There are ebbs, and there are flows. Just let ‘Damaged’ wash over you. It’s what it was designed for.