Timeless classic
9/10
Nixon was the record that got me into alt-country, even if it was the Lambchop album that saw the band off on a tangent too far for some fans of the scene. A highly unlikely marriage of Curtis Mayfield-type soul and pedal-steel country twang, it is an album of authentic and timeless ambience that had lost none of its singularity. Probably because Nixon‘s sound is so odd – dark, lush and jazzy orchestrations, with Kurt Wagner’s deadpan murmer interrupted by cracked, oddball falsettos – it has not been diluted by imitators. It remains a swirling, breezy oddity, best taken in its atmospheric whole than as a sum of individual parts. Somehow both bleak and romantic at the same time, the soulful aspect of this record completely liberates Wagner’s downcast, despondent tales of working-class life, transforming them into something otherwordly and dreamlike. A timeless classic then, for fans of Bon Iver, Iron & Wine, Calexico or even Richard Hawley.
2 responses so far ↓
1 James Jackson Toth - Waiting In Vain // Aug 22, 2008 at 4:18 pm
[...] that inhabit the corners of bars in Charles Bukowski novels. Like Lambchop’s ‘Nixon‘, minus the orchestral embellishments, Toth turns his blue-collar tales of ordinary madness [...]
2 Wish fulfilment // May 17, 2009 at 2:16 pm
[...] de Melody Nelson’ (minus the Gallic funk) and as richly textured as Lambchop’s ‘Nixon‘ (minus the southern-fried [...]
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