Is A Woman

Following a kind of inverse Spinal Tap logic, Lambchop have turned the amps all the way to minus eleven.

Hush, pause and languor stand here as equal substitutes for Nixon’s multi-layered density and, minus the clutter, Kurt Wagner’s battered muse is allowed a quiet chance to shine. Is A Woman rests on a (frequently skeletal) bed of guitar and piano, with occasional barely-discernable flourishes of bell, Rhodes piano or music box.

Then there’s the voice: Wagner never rushes to fill in the gaps, but when he does open his mouth, it’s as wracked and elegaic a sound as you’re likely to hear on record this year.

Here and there, with its lyrical compound of fondness and misanthropy, you could be listening to a dying man in bed with his memories, but these songs are possessed of such warmth and humanity that any potential claustrophobia is neatly stripped away.

As an experiment in meandering soulfulness, it stands as a wonderful mute sister to Tindersticks’ Can Our Love, and that’s some fine company to be keeping. Gently does it…