Original image by There Stands the Glass.
I was dumbfounded as a child when my dad and grandfather shrugged their shoulders when I’d ask how they acquired minor wounds after finishing a task in a field or garage. Their inability to recall the cause of the bloodletting struck me as a form of madness.
I get it now. I’m often unaware of a cut until I spot blood on my clothes. Scrapes barely register against the gradual acceleration of bodily aches and emotional strain. Kurt Wagner trots out an apt cliché on the opening track of Lambchop’s Showtunes: “life will be the death of us all.”
The new album sounds like a resigned meditation on the aging process. Showtunes’ unconventional music and ambiguous lyrics are akin to the literary depictions of akimbo consciousnesses associated with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Accordingly, Wagner and his co-conspirators overlay opera on cabaret and combine electronic gurgles with baroque chamber music. An overworked hip-hop hype sample introduces a languid meditation on the past.
References to cellist Pablo Casals, Jimmy Webb’s pop hit “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and the Lord’s Prayer reflect the free association of a lively but aged mind. "The Last Benedict'' is among the songs chronicling an unsettling awareness of decay. We’re all destined to stop bleeding. Showtunes is a cleareyed foreshadowing of the days preceding that inevitable moment.