Lambchop
OH (Ohio)
Merge Records
By Mike Randall
Sometimes a little room to breathe can make all the difference in the world. Nashville’s Lambchop, long past the stage of being labeled alt-country or any stylistic term for that matter, have of late earned the description ‘slightly overwhelming’ with more regular frequency. With lineups that have constantly rotated and often swelled to upwards of 20 members, Kurt Wagner’s expressive baritone has been muddled with instruments and sounds that have stripped away the music’s emotive core – Wagner. Returning with Lambchop’s eleventh album, OH (Ohio), Wagner makes some of the most beautifully melancholic music of his career, putting the face of a cohesive band on a hushed, jazzy brand of folk that stretches out like a hammock. OH (Ohio) is so subtle, Wagner is often inaudible to the point you have to strain your ears to hear him and all the little intricacies, issuing a surprising challenge to an audience that will find the record a culmination of everything Lambchop has done and its greatest reward since Nixon.
Above anything else, OH (Ohio) is a mood record. Per usual, Wagner’s lyrics are vague and obtuse, seemingly using the tangled world of literature as his muse. He sounds like he’s laying out in a patch somewhere, arms folded behind his head, muttering whatever observations and feelings crawl through his consciousness, allowing the music’s breeze to dictate the pace. There’s a lounge-y vibe to the album-opening “Ohio,” the sole direct reference to the Mid-western state that bears the album’s title. “Ohio seems like a dream to me,” Wagner sings, using a gentle voice, intricately picked classical guitar and subtle horns as if each is a different shade of the same color. Wagner’s Pink Moon guitar seems like it’s raining down from above during “Slipped Dissolved and Loosed,” a gorgeous love song that flutters gently like a leaf blowing in the wind, borrowing from Shakespeare and offering complexly visual lines like “Well I’m not so well acquainted with the topography of your mind / I need a detailed description, a representation of some kind.” We see further examples of Wagner as a romantic troubadour during “Close Up,” strumming his nylon strings with the soft passion that’s fitting of the record’s cover painting.
Despite the intimacy of the record, there are plenty of instances that will fulfill those in need of some toe-tapping twang. “I’m Thinking Of a Number” unfolds into a compact country number, but Wagner pulls out a Rickenbacker for OH (Ohio)’s catchier moments like “National Talk Like A Pirate Day” and “Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King, Jr.” The former is an up-tempo gem that offers quintessentially humorous and confusing Wagner lyrics, such as “Without your eye patch and your parrot/ I’ve been informed it’s national ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’/Perhaps this singing is a refuge/From other equal uncomfortable thoughts.” Still, even when Lambchop picks up the pace, the album does not shed its personal nature, whether it’s through the cushion-y piano of “Sharing A Gibson” or even the out-of-left-field ambient coda of “Popeye.” It’s a band that shines with space, allowing the music to hover instead of attack, and it works for Wagner. Look no further than a track like “A Hold Of You,” a soul number that provides one of many opportunities for Wagner’s group to form a Memphis-like backbone for the singer he’s become.
“I used to be part of a more complicated scheme/As furniture with glass upon my head,” Wagner sings during the linear folk of “Of Raymond.” No line better sums up the vibe of OH (Ohio), intentional or not, as it expresses the delicacy in which Wagner and company toe the line of reverent Americana. He’s free of the constraints of the orchestra-sized lineups that have comprised some of Lambchop’s recent output, and there’s no worry about making any false steps. Wagner sounds at ease, aware he’s found the greatest common denominator from everything he’s done up to this point and translated it into music that both clearly interests him and will fulfill listeners.
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