Lambchop – Aw Cmon / No You Cmon

Nashville collective Lambchop are no stranger to difficult concept albums. Their much-admired 2000 release Nixon, near as anyone can tell, wasn’t actually about Nixon, and their latest, the heavily instrumental pair of simultaneously released albums Aw Cmon and No You Cmon, has its origins in a score that frontman Kurt Wagner composed to accompany F.W. Murnau’s silent film, Sunrise. Appropriately, these releases feel like an indie auteur’s skewered, offsides view of what a silent film soundtrack might be like; it’s vague and arch, minimalist even in its larger moments.

While the discs are intended as a sort of Double Fantasy call-and-response-type concept album, neither bears much obvious relation to each other thematically, though musically they’re decidedly of a piece. Both mix low-key instrumentals with even lower-key ballads, with lots of guitars, loungey pianos, ineffably lovely string passages and passing nods to jazz and rock thrown in. The band’s previous inclinations toward both alt-soul and countrypolitan have been tamped down dramatically; even the more lush orchestral tracks feel muted.

The two discs eventually begin to take on lives of their own. Aw Cmon is more depressing; No You Cmon is more lively, though this isn’t saying a lot. And while the discs ultimately prove to be more complicated than might have seemed on first listen, they’re chillier, too, both accomplished and remote at the same time.

For such an admirably ambitious outing, Aw Cmon and No You Cmon are oddly uneventful, though there are exceptions. The instrumental track “Timothy B. Schmidt” is probably the first-ever shoutout to the erstwhile Eagles bassist; both “Action Figure” and “Under A Dream Of A Lie” are simple and lovely; and the pleasantly creepy “The Gusher” sounds like the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show” theme (“Who can turn the world on with her smile?”) reinvented by the Tindersticks.