Album Review: The Difficulty of Defining Lambchop and the Ease of Enjoying Andrew Bird

Lambchop is number 1 on the list of reasons why I could never be a music reviewer. I don't even know what genre to put them in: Lo-fi? Indie rock? Creepy white guys on string instruments? Still, if you haven't given Lambchop a listen, you owe it to yourself. A quick search on www.epitonic.com can net you several free singles, enough to give you a taste of a truly eccentric band, led by a singer who barely sings, but just speaks to the music--and it works.

With that introduction out of the way, Lambchop's 2006 effort, Damaged, works for me. The bookends of the album, "Paperback Bible" and "Things to Do" are two of the strongest tracks, but the songwriting behind tracks such as "The Rise and Fall of the Letter P" and "The Decline of Country and Western Civilisation" (with an s, not a z, mind you) is admirable. Actually, I'm just assuming that the lyrics are solid because I like the titles. It's the musical equivalent of judging a book by its cover.

The real story of audioquest of the last week, however, isn't Lambchop, with or without their creepy-voiced singer, but another veteran artist I stumbled upon in the course of trying to better train my ear. If you like Damien Rice but wish he'd pick it up a bit, if you think Sun Kil Moon is killer but wish the songs featured more whistling, or if you rock out to Modest Mouse but find them too optimistic, I highly recommend Andrew Bird's new CD, "Armchair Apocrypha". While there is not a skippable song on the album, the third track, "Plasticities", is aurally stunning and an early candidate for Jeff Benson's Song of the Year (considered a huge honor in the music industry, the mere rumor of my approval has catapulted wide-eyed, guitar-slinging twenty-somethings into stardom). "Scythian Empires" and "Yawny at the Apocalypse" also knocked me out cold but left me with a pleasant dream that God had foregone the Second Coming so that he could listen to Andrew Bird make another record.