Lambchop

Damaged

(Merge)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Lambchop’s ninth studio album, Damaged, is a warm and graceful addition to Kurt Wagner & Co.’s genre-bending catalog.  The rougher and rambunctious edges of the collective’s work have been getting smoothed away in their recent releases, and, for all the talk about Lambchop being difficult to pin down, Damaged seems like a pretty natural extension of Aw C’mon / No You C’mon and, especially, Is A Woman.

Damaged comes from a place of personal trauma, and is billed as Wagner’s “most personal” work, inspired (in part) by health problems that included a cancer scare and a major surgery involving a bone graft.  But, of course, there is more to Damaged than predictable ruminations on mortality; Wagner’s strength is in the details, like how he chronicles mid-day boredom on “I Would Have Waited Here All Day.”  That song was originally written for Candi Staton, then Wagner recorded it himself (fearing that some of the song’s language would scare Staton away), and then Staton turned out wanting to use it anyway.  Lines that sound clinical on paper—“The afternoon is a study in stagnation”—are given sweetly desperate life by Wagner’s near-broken croak.

Wagner and his many bandmates—the Lambchop roster numbers 15 this time around—strike gold around the midpoint of Damaged, which is where “I Would Have Waited Here All Day” appears, along with “Day Without Glasses” and “Beers Before the Barbican.”  Each of these songs have an elegant, understated riff that distinguishes it. The treasures of Damaged are slow to reveal themselves, but worth the immersion it takes to get there; when relegated to a background listen, it may not make much of an impression.  The clear exception is the grandiose closer, “The Decline of Country and Western Civilization,” a sort of angry but witty meta-song about Lambchop and, well, exactly what the title says it’s about.