There is no trace of religiosity in the long career of the gods Lambchopthere has been no votive action in these decades of honorable exposition of the fucking Nashvilian material, but evidently the time has come to collide with an extremely earthly need to express one’s own spirituality, the sacred that pulsates within us, the words that however they open a glimpse of the infinite that the good Kurt Wagner he wanted to coincide with this handful of songs from “The Bible”, the mocking but apt title of this umpteenth test of his favorite cover group.
The album collects the salient moments of the recent life of the leader steeped in the depth and density of the theme of mortality, coinciding with the real one of the father, a source from which the album draws in different sizes since the touching initial “A song is sung” , but more widely with the non-eternal fragility of our thoughts, on the reflections that a 65-year-old can have the luxury and the ambitious freedom to do, starting right on the inexorable passage of time (“Every child begins the world again”), on painful sentimental sliding doors that reappear like flashes in the emotional memory (“Daisy”), in general on the perception of the sensitivity that we cannot grasp in the solitude of our ego (“Whatever, mortal”), mystical appeals of distant but apparently real presences ( “A major minor drag”) with all the awareness of these times of banal routine in which we are submerged but which must not prevent us from having a look beyond, a risk of true reality.
And this album is full of hazards, especially musically speaking, with a subdued vitality of experimentation consistent with the last period of Lambchopbut which here is accompanied by an ambitious heterogeneity of styles, ranging from style ballads Bacharach / Cohen (“Daisy”, “Every child …”) a cose nu soul (“Little black boxes”, “Police dog blues”) dear to the friend Bon Iver of which he borrowed the production wing in the figure of Ryan Olson, with all the annexes and connected with the widespread use of audiotune and technology applied to the use of the voice; after which, slowly with each listening the admiration for the meticulousness of the arrangements grows, which in fact take level from the perfect interlocking of the plethora of musicians used, who align themselves with their mastery to this delicate sacredness of treatment to which these songs are subjected (the guitar and gospel choir in “Police dog blues”, the beat of “Little black boxes”, the superb nu jazz bass of “Whatever, mortal”, for example)
The result is an at times sumptuous disc, full of meanings and pretentious listening, of a very high level of writing, which does not want to surprise but to narrate the spirit of these times, an open, varied, light and profound musical book at the same time, years light from the country reinterpretations of the former Lambchop, much more in line with everything that the American tradition of the last 30 years has produced in musical terms. In short, an author’s record, increasingly rare and always for fewer people, alienating and strident if by this we mean for example the inflated use of audiotune to a voice completely disconnected from this technological fiction and certainly light years away from what on average the band’s fans love and would have liked to continue listening, assuming that the first fans of Lambchop they have long since forgotten the fortunes of ours; but Wagner he has always been a bit of a champion, he finds the humility and the courage to pretend to improve, to challenge his audience towards new territories with the only form of contact with the past given by the coherence and depth of the path, one could say by the way in which which he proposes things, as in the case of this “The Bible” where the half miracle of staying in step with the times is performed musically, allowing however to make this apology of the adult phase of life a little less decadent than it actually bitterly consists.