First Listen: Lambchop - Mr. M (album stream)

Mr. M is the sound of a downcast dreamer who, 11 albums and nearly 20 years into his career with Lambchop, is just beginning to find what he's wanted all along.

Lambchop's new album, Mr. M, comes out Feb. 21.


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Review by Stephen Thompson for NPR.org.

The music of Lambchop's Kurt Wagner is almost eerily calm on its surface, but many moving parts roil underneath: Wagner commandeers a large Nashville ensemble that works relentlessly to seem like it's not doing very much, and his words hit harder for the way he humbly and wryly speak-sings them. At their best, Lambchop's records are like kind friends who know how to sugarcoat hard truths.

Out Feb. 21, Mr. M is Lambchop's 11th album, and it's an impeccably appointed set of mostly gentle, always graceful songs. Infused with lovely string arrangements and subtle allusions to loss, they periodically find Wagner trying to come to terms with the 2009 suicide of his friend and kindred spirit, Vic Chesnutt.

But, for an album that once bore the working title Major League Bummer, Mr. M isn't mournful so much as winsome; it's no accident of sequencing that it winds to a close with a redemption song as generous and giant-hearted as "Never My Love." Amid softly plucked acoustic guitars and sweet strings, that song is so direct in its hopefulness and gratitude, it almost sounds as if Wagner is covering Don Williams again. But it's just the sound of a downcast dreamer who, nearly 20 years into his career with Lambchop, is just beginning to find what he's wanted all along.

Review by Stephen Thompson for NPR.org. Please visit that link to show your appreciation and to support them and/or to stream track by track.

From wikipedia

Lambchop, originally Posterchild, is a band from Nashville, Tennessee. Lambchop is loosely associated with the alternative country genre. The music website Allmusic refers to them as "arguably the most consistently brilliant and unique American group to emerge during the 1990s".

Never a band with a "core" lineup, Lambchop has consisted of a large and fluid collective of musicians focused around its creative centre, frontman Kurt Wagner. Initially indebted to traditional country, the music has subsequently moved through a range of influences including post-rock, soul and lounge music.

Whatever the style, the characteristic mood of Lambchop's music is evoked by Wagner's distinctive songwriting: lyrically subtle and ambiguous, the vocals melodic but understated. Setting this apart from other minimalist songwriters is the large group of backing musicians, with the range of instruments and styles that it brings. Wagner's songwriting bears similarities with soul musicians such as Barry White, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye as much as with country and folk music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambchop_(band)

Links
http://www.lambchop.net/
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http://www.myspace.com/lambchopisaband