There’s a sparkling highway running through the heart of Nashville, and near it, there’s a beaten trail, and off of that, there’s Lambchop, the Sweat Hogs of the Music City. The ever-changing head count ends up thirteen on Nixon, the band’s fifth full-length, release, and just like the album’s namesake, the resourceful porchestra goes on about their business of breaking rules.
Nixon is wired up with prime-moving, vintage Gibson guitar rendering Kurt Wagner’s own version of country music. His stampede, though unbridled, gently mires, trickles and spurts throughout ten songs that he promises are country tunes. Perhaps when he was a youngun his mother said, “You march right outta that pigeonhole young man.” And so here we are.
Reckoning Wagner’s spirited art of twisting the mundane (his preferred canvas), it is easy to swallow musical draftings around things like the contrast between true love and dried animal carcasses, and how these rather opposing elements might share equal space in his mind for a sec. This would be “The Distance From Her To There”, a percolating-guitar, brooding-horn and blubbering-pedal-steel soliloquy sung from the steps, under the stars.
Wagner cheers for love lots. It shows up best on “The Book I Haven’t Read”, which he calls “straight, sappy sentiment.” Here, guitar plucks act out the shivers down his spine, and the late Curtis Mayfield clocks in (via dub) from his “Baby It’s You”, as enlisted by Wagner to deeper instill a “love” aftertaste. The book he’s referring to, of course, is the one of love. A track from the wrong side of the bed is “Up With People”, where Wagner gives a loungy middle finger to Up With People. Helping him drive the point home are members of the Bobby Jones Gospel Singers, who provide delightful drama.
Throughout Nixon, Lambchop try to constrain their smiles and just wink, but instrumentally they’re as serious as thirteen heart attacks. So If you’re into that sort of procreation teamed with flirty twang…
