Lambchop Take Their Time with TRIP
Kurt Wagner and co. continue their late-career renaissance with covers of Wilco, Stevie Wonder and more
In 2016, Lambchop, once famously dubbed “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band,” reinvented themselves with FLOTUS, an album of glitchy electronica and autotune crooning partially inspired by contemporary hip-hop. After 20 years and 11 albums of waltzing alternative country, soul and baroque pop, FLOTUS’ pineapple-on-pizza experimentation seemed like a surefire late-career disaster on paper. However, frontman Kurt Wagner and his bandmates pulled it off: Autotune smoothed the familiar warts on Wagner’s warble, Tony Crow’s piano fit snugly alongside hazy synths, and a more abstract songwriting approach put a soft reset on what Lambchop could sound like.
FLOTUS, and its excellent follow-up This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You), heralded an unlikely late-career renaissance for Lambchop that they continue on TRIP, their surprising new six-song covers EP, out now on Merge Records. So the story goes, TRIP started as both an experiment of control and a way to save money. Rather than trek to Europe for a financially questionable tour in December of 2019, Wagner instead invited his bandmates to cut a covers record in Nashville over the course of a week. However, rather than Wagner pick all the songs, he chose one and urged his five other bandmates to pick a cover. Each member then led the recording sessions for their selected song.
The resulting tracklist sounds like a particularly wild shuffle on a hip friend’s iPod classic: Wilco, George Jones, an obscure ‘70s garage band called Mirrors, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, James McNew of Yo La Tengo. Creating a cohesive listening experience out of these disparate songs is the kind of “square peg in a round hole” challenge on which Lambchop have thrived as of late, and by and large, they deliver one of their most accessible, psychedelic and beautiful projects yet.
Whether it’s the friendly collaborative nature of the EP’s concept, or the fact that these guys just love playing together, there’s a breezy assuredness to the music that merges Lambchop’s electronic present with their pedal steel- and guitar-heavy past. This feels especially natural in “Where the Grass Won’t Grow,” made famous by the legendary Jones. Rather than recreate the song’s rustic twang, Lambchop double the track’s original length. Matt Swanson’s loping bass and Paul Niehaus’ extra syrupy pedal steel add an unexpected hypnotic groove to this fieldworker’s tale of cyclical tragedy.