18 November 2011
Newsdesk
It starts with some casual cursing yet the last word is ‘love’. It began when singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Wagner turned away from music and picked up his brushes to paint his way out of a funk that followed the premature death of friend Vic Chesnutt, who the band backed on 1998’s The Salesman and Bernadette. And though the sprawling multi-headed quiet juggernaut that is Lambchop most often treasure performance over artifice, their eleventh album is very much a studio creation.
Set for release through City Slang on February 20th 2012, ‘Mr. M’ will be accompanied by European tour, including a special show at London’s Barbican on March 1st.
Mr M started in a painter’s studio in fact. Wagner explains. “As I worked, I was approached by Mark Nevers (former full time band member & producer for the likes of Andrew Bird and Will Oldham) with the idea of making another Lambchop record. He had a concept of a sound and a method that worked with the tone of my writing. His idea was a kind of ‘psycha-Sinatra’ sound, one that involved the arranging of strings and other sounds in a more open and yet complex way.
It was a studio creation, not a type of recording based on band performance, and this was a radical approach for us. I felt Lambchop had one more good record in us, and this time I was going to do things as directly and true to my desires as possible.”
More information on ‘Mr M’ to follow in the new year, but in the meantime you can download album opener, ‘If Not I’ll Just Die’ here: http://soundcloud.com/cityslang/lambchop-if-not-ill-just-die
See Lambchop live, supported by Courtney Tidwell.
01.03. UK - London, Barbican
03.03. IRL - Dublin, Vicar´s Street
04.03. UK - Gateshead, Sage
05.03. UK - Glasgow, Oran Mor
06.03. UK - Manchester, Cathedral
07.03. UK - Bristol, Fleece
