LAMBCHOP

AWCMONNOYOUCMON

Review of “Aw C’Mon”: After the spare musical textures of Lambchop's 2002 album, Is a Woman, Kurt Wagner and his king-sized chamber pop ensemble have returned to full force with Aw C'mon, the first of two albums the group released on the same day in February 2004. Ambitious, eclectic, and boasting lush string charts performed by the Nashville String Machine (the orchestra-for-hire that has been adding countrypolitian polish to country & western recording sessions since the 1970s), Aw C'mon (as well as its sibling, No, You C'mon) easily trumps Nixon for widescreen musical grandeur, which makes for a lovely if puzzling contrast with the whispered thumbnail sketches of Wagner's lyrics and vocals. Delivered in a craggy murmur and often mixed low enough that one sometimes has to strain to hear them, Kurt Wagner's stories focus on the small details of life's big events rather than the shape of the larger picture, while his music builds an impressive sonic mosaic out of the assorted tones and textures of this 13-piece ensemble and the myriad pop, R&B, and country influences that inform his music. In fact, the album's instrumental cuts, "Being Tyler," "The Lone Official," and "Timothy B. Schmidt," pack nearly as much emotional resonance as most of the vocal numbers, which seems to reinforce the notion that Wagner is going for mood as much as message here. Aw C'mon is lovely, compelling, mysterious, and confounding; it's hard to know just what is supposed to lurk at the core of this music, but Lambchop have given listeners enough fine music that digging to the center is fine and rewarding work.

Review of “No You C’Mon”: Well, if it's good enough for Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, and Guns N' Roses, it must be good enough for Lambchop, and Kurt Wagner's super-sized Nashville chamber pop ensemble have followed in the footsteps of the above-mentioned artists by releasing two albums of new material on the same day. No, You C'mon was written and recorded at the same time as its sister set, Aw C'mon, and stylistically the two albums are cut from the same mold -- expansive, lushly arranged pop melodies with classic R&B and country accents, often accompanied by Wagner's engaging cryptic lyrics and nicotine-laced vocals, given life by a 13-piece band and aided by polished string arrangements. In fact, the most difficult question to answer about this music is just what's the difference between Aw C'mon and No, You C'mon? The obvious response is not much of anything, particularly in terms of execution and quality -- the two albums sound like twin sides of the same coin, and while Aw C'mon doesn't have a track that rocks as hard as "Nothing Adventurous Please," No, You C'mon lacks a cut as willfully odd as "Women Help to Create the Kind of Men They Despise." In short, there's a serious case of yin and yang going on between these two albums, and it's all but impossible to single out one as better than the other -- if you love this band, you're going to want to have both, as they represent Lambchop's strange but beautiful worldview writ large, and if you've never heard the band before, both represent the band's current state of mind equally well. In fact, these two discs would have made for a fine double album, and if Lambchop have chosen to regard them as two separate entities, that just means they've released two of the finest albums of 2004 instead of just one.

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