1) If Not I'll Just Die; 2) 2B2; 3) Gone Tomorrow; 4) Mr. Met; 5) Gar; 6) Nice Without Mercy; 7) Buttons; 8) The Good Life (Is Wasted); 9) Kind Of; 10) Betty's Overture; 11) Never My Love
Suave and richly orchestrated; it's the Lambchop you know and love, but with more strings.
Key tracks: "If Not I'll Just Die", "2B2", "Gone Tomorrow"
To this day I think the perfect incapsulation of Lambchop is the opening of "If Not I'll Just Die", with a lush string serenade straight out of vintage Hollywood opening way to Kurt Wagner's gentle grunt, bluntly uttering "don't know what the fuck they're talking about" like he's in the completely wrong song. My theory with Lambchop is that out of the pre-synth works, your favourite is always going to be the one that you hear first. Lambchop have a very specific sound, dry humour and bored-still Sundays mingling with suave americana, and they've kept it going from album to album with little variation (before the synthesizer ones starting from 2016's FLOTUS but this disclaimer is going to get really clunky really quickly so that's the last time I'll raise it). That doesn't mean no variation, but that it's all rather subtle, with particular aspects highlighted and de-emphasised in turn in a way that it takes a fan who has heard all those albums to hear the differences. It makes Lambchop consistent enough that whoever hears one of their albums and likes its sound is bound to like a lot of the others too - but the particular balance of elements of that first experience will be the most familiar balance you'll come to always favour. Mr. M was my first Lambchop album, and it's also my favourite.
Mr. M's particular take on the Lambchop sound revolves around its string sections. String ensembles aren't new territory for the oft-expanded lineup of Lambchop and they appear throughout the band's discography, but not quite like this. The strings on Mr. M are like a duet partner for Kurt Wagner, trading their own lines with his lyrics, moving about without established rotas or rigid structures they'd need to follow. The songs on Mr. M started out as sparsely arranged vessels with a lot of space for other instruments to claim their spot in, before it was agreed for the strings to become the lead actor intentionally. The idea was to replicate old school Hollywood crooner ballad strings ("psycho-Sinatra" as they called it), inspired by how they took the lead from other band instruments and often played around in little movements of their own - and despite the heavily layered production work that generally devotes attention to all the elements no matter how small, it's the strings in particular you'll notice throughout the album. Lambchop have always proudly scruffed their shirt collars and added a little intentional ugliness over their beautiful songs, but Mr. M is elegant and polite throughout and by nature, floating on its string ensembles.
Beyond that, Mr. M keeps to the faithful formula: Wagner's half-abstract slice-of-life stories, muttered calmly over a series of low-to-mid tempo plodders, in the best possible way you can use 'plodder' as a descriptor. They are uniformly lovely, cosy as a hot cup of coffee on a cold autumn day and lush to listen to thanks to the sweet production. Part and parcel with Lambchop albums is that the songs tend to slightly bleed into one another at some point or another, but the eleven tracks of Mr. M are all quite independently strong; this includes the two instrumentals which let the orchestrations and production blossom as the unrestricted leads (particularly on the lovely lounge-orchestral "Gar"). The album regularly gives itself a little shake to avoid repeating the same tricks the same way and there’s regular strong points across the tracklist, but the opening trio in particular is quite possibly the best sequence of tracks in Lambchop history. The sweet and pastoral "If Not I'll Just Die", the dream-like melancholy of "2B2" and the gently urgent "Gone Tomorrow", which moves from one of Wagner's best chorus melodies to a long outro where the song dismantles and reconstructs itself back into place with gorgeous studio wizardry - all not just album highlights, but career highlights. The plaintive and pretty title track and the aforementioned "Gar" pick up well from there too, and lead onto the more restful (apart from the breezy "The Good Life") latter half. Pretty much everything stands out - a rarity for a Lambchop album, even as a fan.
One thing that struck me when going through interviews around the album is that Wagner seemed to be close to giving up on music altogether before this album. Mr. M follows a brief hiatus period where Wagner began to focus on his painting (the album artwork is all by him), and by all accounts it took him a great deal and coaxing from his friends to return to music. The album is dedicated to his close friend Vic Chesnutt, whose death shook Wagner quite a lot, and Wagner has quoted himself stating that the writing process for Mr. M began with him stating that there’s still at least one album left in the band, that even if it wasn’t going to be the last Lambchop album they were going to treat it as if it were. If Mr. M sounds like it's pushing the band's formula forward and its song selection is stronger than the average album by them, the context around it seems to explain why: that if Wagner were to break his silence and break from music, it needed to be with something that felt like it had something to say. I still go by my theory of first pickings, and maybe another Lambchop album would be my personal favourite had I heard it first, but to my ears Mr. M sounds like the most fully-rounded version of the standard Lambchop sound, something that could be a magnum opus swansong without it actually being one. In the frighteningly consistent Lambchop discography there’s the enjoyable albums and then there’s the albums where the band threaten to jump into classic territory; and this is one of the latter.
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