Lambchop - How I Quit Smoking (1995)

1) For Which We Are Truly Thankful; 2) The Man Who Loved Beer; 3) The Militant; 4) We Never Argue; 5) Life's Little Tragedy; 6) Suzieju; 7) All Smiles and Mariachi; 8) The Scary Caroler; 9) Smuckers; 10) The Militant (Reprise); 11) Garf; 12) Your Life as a Sequel; 13) Theöne; 14) Again

This is where Lambchop set their form, and if you're familiar with that form you'll already know exactly what to expect. In good and bad.

Key tracks: "We Never Argue", "Suzieju", "Theöne"

The Lambchop formula, if you will, finds its footing here. Their first album saw Kurt Wagner and his gang with one foot in alt country and one foot in slacker-esque alt rock, and now the weight's started to shift towards the former. "Americana" is arguably a better descriptor than country through: Lambchop doesn't really have the twang of a country act, but the sweeping strings, smooth orchestration and quiet acoustic murmurs all have their roots in the vintage American songbook, which Wagner interprets through his own peculiar personality traits. Lambchop albums differ by tiny factors usually detectable only by seasoned veterans of the band's music, and on How I Quit Smoking that factor is the mere act that it lays down the tracks for the next two decades. The influence of the first album is still deep in the album's psyche, though. You know how on early 90s alternative rock or indie rock albums you've got that one much slower song - sometimes with strings - that isn't really a ballad but more of an introspective moment of calm that's there to balance the album's flow? Imagine an entire album of those back to back, just remove the excess rock artistry from the equation (I can’t imagine this was a particularly exciting time to be a drummer for Lambchop, for example).

In general though, if you know Lambchop you know how this goes. Wagner mutters surrealist everyday vignettes (which often elicit a genuine chuckle), the tempo barely ever goes beyond calmly trodding ("All Smiles and Mariachi" is the only uptempo number here and I use that term extremely loosely) and overall it all goes on for a little too long while sounding a little too similar throughout, but it's nonetheless all very pleasant to listen to. How I Quit Smoking isn’t really about the power of songcraft or individual set pieces, it’s one long sustained mood where barely anything happens unless you view it through a microscope. At their most Lambchoppiest the band's music can get downright samey, and How I Quit Smoking is what you'd point towards as a solid example of that. It sets the band's norms but because of that, it also doesn't tinker around with them like some of the later albums do and so it is particularly one-note. Its charms are practically passive, the songs more of a mindset and a moodscape that present themselves without causing a stir - but if you're in a Lambchop mood it works wonder. That near-perfect collaboration between mood and music is likely why there are so many people who like this band, including me - sometimes there's no other music that would work better than Wagner's quiet grace. 

Nonetheless, to give How I Quit Smoking some credit of its own there are a few particular pieces of excellence that do stand out. "We Never Argue", "Life's Little Tragedy" and "Suzieju" forms the album's charmingly swooning core, full to their brim with the kind of elegance that would become more familiar across some albums down the line. "We Never Argue" also presents the album's catchiest vocal melody and the flute hook of "Suzieju" is the musical equivalent, so they're the bops of the record if you will, if that makes a difference. "Theöne" is a superlatively beautiful string-laden number which ends the record with an honestly touching way, with "Again" serving as its quick all-strings reprise to officially close things down. Those aren't the only parts of the album that jump out, but they're the notable ones in a sea of gentle guitar melodies, Wagner's murmur and barely-there percussion hits from one song to another, some of which are nicer than others. The only real point of criticism is that "The Militant" doesn't need to appear twice, because even if the "reprise" version has a different tone to the first version and so arguably justifies its existence, it's still the same song and bloats a tracklist that already feels like a dragging Sunday afternoon at times.

Otherwise though, unless you're insistent on listening to things chronologically (or you feel particularly inspired by this review to listen to this out of the blue, in which case, why?) by the time you get to this album you know the drill, and you'll likely have accepted it already. Lambchop have done better albums - many genuinely great - and then they've done albums like How I Quit Smoking that offer exactly what you expect and which works exactly how you'd like it to. Regardless of whether it's actually a truly memorable album is almost a moot point - it's comfortably Wagnerian at its most base form.

Rating: 6/10

Lambchop - Mr. M (2012)

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.

Rating: 8/10