Can you ever have too much of a good thing? That's the question which the seventh and eighth albums by Lambchop inadvertently pose. For here are 24 new tunes, spread over two CDs, many written by Lambchop pivot Kurt Wagner as part of a personally-imposed project to create a song a day.
Long-term Lambchop fans will already have guessed that a tossed-off Wagner song has an emotional depth and melodic richness that many other songwriters would take months to approximate. And at first, the likes of 'Steve McQueen' and 'Nothing But A Blur From A Bullet Train' – to pluck a couple of songs from 'Aw Cmon' – seem as lush and serene as anything this fine band have ever recorded. The spectral minimalism of 2002's tremendous 'Is A Woman' has been replaced with big arrangements that hark back to 2000's 'Nixon', with cavernous string sections lead by Lloyd Barry augmenting the already vast Lambchop line-up.
But as the two CDs roll pleasantly along, Wagner's gritty eccentricities and his artful twists occasionally disappear from view. His songs have always depended on tiny differences: 'Is A Woman' required multiple fastidious listens to get inside individual songs. This time, though, great swathes of music – quite a bit of it purely instrumental - seem to pass in a kind of elegant blur. Perfectly lovely to listen to, undoubtedly, but curiously difficult to digest.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is how completely Lambchop sound like Lambchop these days. It's a noble aim to create a sound which absorbs its influences so totally that they become invisible, and that's what Wagner and his cohorts have done on 'Aw Cmon/No You Cmon'. Orchestral southern soul, country, supper club jazz, indie rock: here, it's hard to pick any of them out of the quintessential Lambchop stew. All well and good, but the perfection of a sound can also be constricting, formulaic even.
The one new development is a tentative negotiation with rock. Guitarist William Tyler's elevation to key player isn't quite as pronounced as the title of 'Aw Cmon''s sumptuous opener – 'Being Tyler' – might suggest; Tony Crow, the 'Chop's louche pianist, remains the steering influence on many of these songs - the two duel stylishly on 'Timothy B Schmidt' and 'Jan 24'. On the marginally superior 'No You Cmon', the strings retreat and Tyler comes more into definition with, first, a spiralling solo on 'Low Ambition', then more surprisingly with the fizzing, Velvety dronepunk of 'Nothing Adventurous Please' and the Exile-On-Side-Street, low-key boogie of 'Shang A Dang Dang'.
Amidst all this, Wagner keeps a relatively slight profile, favouring his quizzical baritone rather than the speculative falsetto that earned him so many abstruse comparisons with Curtis Mayfield a few years ago. It's significant, though, that the outstanding track on either album is 'Aw Cmon''s closer, 'Action Figure', a ruminatory shuffle that harks back to the hushed textures of 'Is A Woman'. "I heard a rumour that I'm sad," he begins, a perpetually wry and thoughtful figure who, at his best, can make stasis and minuscule mood swings sound as gripping as emotional turbulence.
That Wagnerian character is stamped all over these two albums, but is paradoxically harder to find than usual amidst so much seductive flannel. Which leads us to a sadly inevitable conclusion: out of these two good albums, a great single album is fighting to break out. C'mon, hire an editor next time.
