Lambchop - This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)

Pitchfork 81

Kurt Wagner uses restraint with a masterful touch on his latest record, applying a light vocodor touch to his voice to illuminate the intimacy of his understated songwriting.

The Guardian 80

(Merge Records)

Lambchop are an object lesson in how a band can grow old gracefully. Frontman Kurt Wagner’s deadpan observations give them an idiosyncrasy that insulates them from changing fashions, making them too ornery and fresh to fit into the alt-country bracket they could have boringly slumped into. And just as their wry, quietly symphonic songwriting threatened to calcify, they switched it up and – like Stephen Malkmus earlier this month, and so many other mid-life crises in US indie – went electronic for 2016 album Flotus.