While most of his fellow alt-country practitioners are happy to stick to a reliably rich formula of a simple strum and world-weary mumble, Lambchop's Kurt Wagner has always thought in grander terms. For his gorgeous breakthrough album, 'Nixon', Wagner brought a Motown sensibility to the dusty traditions of lo fi'n'western, and two years later he's returned to the studio with an equally ambitious vision.
'Is A Woman' is, deep breath, a concept album of sorts. It starts with a simple soft piano and ends with a similar sound but Wagner says the idea is for this "feel" to have changed during the journey of the record. Moreover, each song is supposed to be a "closing" song: the last number of a live show or cut of an album, the last word when all your passions are spent and you're slumped exhausted at the end of the line.
It's a reflection of Wagner's personality that his idea of the end of a perfect night out is a whisper rather than a crescendo. The mood of 'Is A Woman', in contrast to the often-sprightly 'Nixon', is slow, detached, measured. Wagner glows with the promise of heart and soul, but somehow he always stops short of outright passion. These songs are the shadow of emotion, the white line drawn around emotion's absent form.
Much of this sense of standing back can be contributed to Wagner's voice which has grown into one of the most idiosyncratic of the modern age. Like a leavened Stuart Staples, he sounds warm yet distracted, like the echo you get when you sing into the hole of an acoustic guitar. The instrumentation, meanwhile, is lush and simple, like having a secret in your ribcage. The combination is a strange yet compulsive one.
What really defines 'Is A Woman', though, are Wagner's lyrics. At best oblique with careful wisdom hidden between the lines, at worst outright gibberish that sounds like someone grasping blindly for profundity, the words are a maze for listener to lose themselves in. Let go of a need for immediate meaning and surrender to the sublime melodies and the hints and half moods and you'll be in heaven. Try and make sense of it all and you'll end up with a headache.
'Is A Woman' is a deep, rewarding, frustrating, baffling, engaging experience then, an album that drifts away from you just when you're getting hold of it. When it works ('My Blue Wave' and the perfection of the couplet "He's not sure what to do/And I'm not sure what to tell him what to do"; the luxurious 'Flick'; 'D Scott Parsley'), you almost feel transported to the era of "The Great Gatsby" and unspoken truths. When it doesn't, they'd be better off letting the music do all the talking.
A partial success, then. Not quite the stupendous achievement of 'Nixon', but still head and shoulders above all Wagner's peers, bar Calexico. Salute him for his bravery and what he couldn't quite reach.
