Remember that unsettling feeling while watching Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper doing the hustle with homely whores and lip-synching Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet? Sunnyside up, that's Lambchop. Lambchop may sound like ambient country, but, oh, the words, the off-hand masochism, the sinister velvet (underground) underpinnings-imagine the kind of squirm that the locals in staid Nashville do when confronted with Lambchop.
An extended family of a dozen players working around head vocalist/guitarist Kurt Wagner, Lambchop's second CD (following I Hope You're Sitting Down) is pure Nashville narcotic. Laid down in a bed of gently reverberating electric and steel guitars, tympani, brush strokes, clarinet, organ and strings, Wagner's easy going croon is a set up for what lies below. One can only begin to hint at the skewered lyrical terrain of these songs, but take a listen to "The Militant," "All Smiles and Mariachi," "The Scary Caroler," "Smuckers" and "Garf" and fall into a very twisted rabbit hole.
What really separates Lambchop from the rest of the supermarket is that Wagner and Co. are kitsch free, or, more accurately, have developed their own airtight brand of kitsch: no nod, no wink, just the shiny smooth dark underside of Orbison, Lee Hazelwood, Chet Atkins and Jim Reeves. Arsenic and old country. Valium and bowling shoes. More inherently threatening to the Grand Old Opry than a busload of GBV clones. Perfectly perverse. Laudable.