Lambchop - 'Damaged' (City Slang) Released 14/08/06

Fancy a tune about a car boot sale? Fear not, Lambchop haven’t taken rock’s current The Streets and Arctic Monkeys-inspired obsession with grubby social realism to its grown-up conclusion by crafting a paean to browsing for bargains amidst piles of tattered refuse from garages and lofts on a pub car park. Although ‘Paperback Bible’, the opener on the Nashville troupe’s eighth LP, isn’t far off, inspired as it is by the long-running US National Public Radio program Swap Shop, an on-the-air equivalent of a jumble sale.

The song’s litany of items - prom dress, herd of goats, malfunctioning TV, puppies, the titular good book - listeners are attempting to off-load should be painfully prosaic stuff. Instead, set to heartbreaking chord changes delivered by fingerpicked guitar, tenderly plucked bass, sparsely tinkled piano, subtle sonic tweaking courtesy of Hands Off Cuba - the latest addition to Lambchop’s bulging portfolio of talent - and weeping strings, it's a stunning start to the album. Whether an outstandingly original metaphor for dumping the useless clutter that tends to take over our lives or the surprisingly successful outcome of a songwriting challenge to use the least fertile subject matter possible, ‘Paperback Bible’ is goosebumb-inducing stuff, a simultaneously poignant and funny celebration of the humble details of the daily grind, with a healthy dollop of sympathy for the foibles of mankind and a pinch or two of sugar-free sentimentality to warm the proceedings.

Such capacity for moulding magic from the mundane marks a thrilling return to form for one of America’s best-loved alt. rock institutions. Mainstay Kurt Wagner’s mastery of his warm, conversational tones and the expansive sound of the ever-evolving line-up mean that he could recite the menu of his local take-away and still sound halfway decent, and his penchant for cataloguing the minutiae of his life on the less inspired moments of Lambchop’s last two albums - 2002’s skeletal ‘Is A Woman’ and 2004’s unfocused double ‘Aw C’Mon/No You C’Mon’ - came perilously close to such an uninspiring scenario. There’s no evidence whatsoever of similar coasting on ‘Damaged’, an elegant charmer of an album that grabs you by the lapel - gently - with moving moments of quiet magnificence which find ‘Chop finally equal - and surpass - the astounding strike-rate of 2000’s ‘Nixon’, the band’s uncontested peak thus far.

Whereas that glowing masterpiece located a soothing spot halfway between Curtis Mayfield and classic country balladry, on ‘Damaged’ the band’s music defies all attempts at categorisation. Although pedal steel pops in occasionally with a whiff of beer-stained honky tonkin’, and in ‘I Would Have Waited Here All Day’, a warm and witty frustrated housewife’s lament written for Candi Staton, the platter packs a full-blown southern-fried soul opus, this is purely Lambchop music, with the band’s uniquely grand tones, which flex from a minimal hush to luxurious lushness and soaring storms of monumental sound in a blink of an eye, providing a suitably striking canvas for Wagner’s singular songwriting.