‘FLOTUS’: Mesmerizing Music, Unintelligible Lyrics

Lambchop (originally called Posterchild), an alternative country band, was formed in Nashville in 1986. The band gained popularity in the 1990s and continues its legacy with its 12th studio album “FLOTUS (For Love Often Turns Us Still)” which will be released Nov. 4th. They have achieved moderate critical acclaim: “Kurt Wagner is best known for his gentle, yet authoritative singing voice and for witty and deeply insightful lyrics, which make room for both the downhome and the abstract, the folksy and the avant garde,” American Songwriter Magazine wrote in 2012. Their most recent album album mesmerizes with sound, but the lyrics are too obscured to adequately portray even the uncomplicated themes of their music.

The album’s greatest strength is the compilation of interesting beats, patterns, and tones that together create transfixing music. This is deeply apparent in the first single from the album, “The Hustle.” The repetition of a beat first blossoms into a soothing melody and returns to percussive repetition, ultimately culminating in a staccato rhythm. Then in “JFK” the music sounds organ-like and then transforms into a sound full of bass, percussion, and repetitions of high-pitched patterns of tones. These layers are primarily created with piano, percussion, bass, guitar, and human voices, which come together to make multi-faceted music.

The instrumental part of “JFK” is transfixing, yet the lyrics are hard to understand—they are either sung softly or overpowered by the versatile tones of the music. As the album title promises, the lyrics meditate on the theme of love; because the instrumental aspects are so overpowering, however, these messages are not clear. In “NIV,” Kurt Wagner sings, “You are faith/You are [unintelligible]/[unintelligible]/You are feeling lonely”. How the subject of faith transforms into loneliness remains unclear. However, their unintelligible lyrics bring attention to the originality of the patterns in the music. Their uniqueness comes through using unintelligible lyrical components—in “Relatives #2” they sing the monosyllabic sound, “Do,” repeatedly. The unintelligible sounds are evidence of the band’s creativity, but they hide the themes of love that the band is trying to convey.

Only occasionally are the lyrics understandable; when they are, the lyrical content is simple and adheres to straightforward themes. An example is “Writer”—the only song that truly brings attention to the lyrics rather than the instrumental. It begins with the words, “Once there was a writer now a reader / Once there was a savior now a spender / Once there was a maker now a repeater / Once there was a friend now a reminder / Once there was a doer now a thinker/ Once there was a fool always a fool.” Here, the proactive (“a doer”) becomes sedentary (“a thinker”). In “The Hustle” Kurt Wagner sings, "It was talk of love in Tennessee / Of the beauty of the seventies.” It is one of the rare moments when they are intelligible and the (now comprehensible) lyrics reflects the love theme of the album.

Past its occasionally intelligible lyricism, the defining aspect of the album is the long melodic instrumental portions that are ultimately empty. “In Care of 8675309” at 11 minutes and 51 seconds is both mesmerizing and repetitive. At a confounding 18 minutes and 13 seconds, the album’s first single “The Hustle,” has very few lyrics. At one point Wagner repeats “Do the hustle” an innumerable number of times. The lyrics of “In Care of 8675309” and the little snippets of miscellaneous sounds in “The Hustle” are heard and then forgotten—unmemorable moments in unnecessarily long songs.

Despite the length of some of the songs, the hidden lyrics, and random unintelligible sounds, “FLOTUS” is extraordinary in musical content. When the lyrics are heard and understood they speak to a coherent theme. When the sounds are intelligible they are pleasurable. When the songs are edited to the proper length they are bearable. With that said, “FLOTUS” is not Lambchop’s prime.