Quick, Before It Melts.

A lot of times, real musical talent gets lost among the hotly tipped and muchly blogged, and I no doubt have been guilty of "forgetting" about some of the best stuff I get to hear for the sake of blogging in the moment, but today I want to kind of kill two birds with one post, as it were.

I've been a fan of Lambchop since I first hear their album, Nixon, way back in 2000. I'll never forget the day I wandered into a garage sale in my neighbourhood and found a framed oil-painted, mass-produced copy of the Nixon artwork--I knew then and there that I was fated to love that album. Eight years on, it strikes me how much Kurt Wagner (the man behind Lambchop's musical collective) sounds like Richard Hawley, and how similar their music tends to be. Subsequent albums have failed to impress me in the same way Nixon did, but with each new album, I've been curious enough to check out what Lambchop has to offer.

I've known that there's going to be a new Lambchop album in October for well over a month now, but it seemed too far in advance to blog about it. But really, why should I wait to share the music with you? Does good music have a best before date? Should I be concerned about doing my part to maximize the commercial success of the album by timing my post to coincide with the release date? Should I censor my own blogging habits so that I appear "in the know" with my blogging colleagues?

Hell, no. Dear QBiM readers, here's the jump on a great band, set to release a (possibly) great album in the future. Kurt Wagner is planning on setting out on a solo tour in support of the album, saying that, "Lambchop more and more has become a vehicle for my songs and myself as an artist. I've fought against that interpretation for twenty years, but now I've just given up trying to fight it anymore." Where the band was at one time 20 members strong, the 2008 version of Lambchop has been scaled down to a core group of seven, with Wagner at its helm. If you enjoy the mellow sounds of "Slipped Dissolved and Loosed" then I think you'll really like OH (ohio), which will be released by Merge Records on October 7. If nothing else, you should be intrigued by Wagner's song titles like, "National Talk Like a Pirate Day," "Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr," and "I'm Thinking of a Number."

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.: Lambchop :.
myspace : hype machine : elbo.ws