Country's frayed fringe

As much a handy marketing term as a loose, bona fide music category, alt.country is (if you will) a country cousin to punk rock: a response to the lumbering behemoths that have presided over Nashville for the past 15 years. Populated by either aggrieved, ornery country musicians or people whose music is so outside the Nashville norm that there's no other category they can fit into, alt.country has burped up many great and strange acts, but none more so than Lambchop.

Based in Nashville, but not of Nashville (tellingly recognised by Emmylou Harris but not Wynonna Judd), Lambchop are the nearest thing country music has to an ensemble orchestra. Dovetailing facets of arcane country music with soul - from the silvery ghost of Jim Reeves to the choppy lushness of Curtis Mayfield and Teddy Pendergrass - Lambchop are at the far edge of alt.country, a place where the fringes are allowed, indeed encouraged, to fray.

"In a lot of ways I guess we have to go somewhere and that's where we landed," says chief chop Kurt Wagner, talking from his front porch in Nashville and sounding for all the world like a Southern gent taking it nice 'n' easy with a mint julep or two. "I'm not so sure how to describe what it is we do, and that's possibly part of the difficulty. We cover so many different things, so we're easy to slot into any category. People are free to call us what they want, so if alt.country is where we have landed, then it's sort of okay. That said, I think Lambchop is much more than that. I definitely think we expand beyond any sort of singular sound. We incorporate a lot of different sounds in what we do and, as we've grown, we don't necessarily abandon it, it just becomes another element of what our sound is."

Kurt Wagner is one of alt.country's more ambiguous figures. Of European descent, growing up in Nashville inevitably inculcated an interest in country music, an appreciation enhanced through cello lessons and a stint playing in the Youth Orchestra. In his teens he started to play guitar and "promptly forgot everything I'd ever been taught in classical music terms". From his college years onwards, Wagner concentrated on being a painter and sculptor. He left Nashville for a career in visual art, but returned after 10 years, shifting his creative impulses once again to music.

While Lambchop crosses many musical boundaries (they utilise horn and string sections amid the usual clatter of rhythm and lead instruments, and employ what they amusingly refer to as "open-end wrenches"), Wagner's lyrics are urbane, contrary propositions, as sophisticated as they are seedy.

"Maybe there is something seedy about the writing," he concedes, following initial reservations. "What I'm trying to do lately is not be afraid to articulate some thoughts that might come into my mind in passing but that I wouldn't want anyone to know about. Perhaps some of that is a little seedy. I don't think of myself as a seedy kind of guy or anything. I have these thoughts like everyone else. I'm a very honest writer, but I don't think of myself as being extremely sophisticated or anything like that - it's more something I strive for."

Wagner's view is affiliated to the melodrama of country music as much as the normal, banal aspects. His words are written, he says, in the context of his contemporary life and are neither fictional nor cliched. His singing style is post-modern crooning, and it's no surprise at all to find out that he admires the voice of Jim Reeves. ("I don't think I'm a very good singer, but I do aspire to being one. Somehow in my brain I hear crooning, but I'm certainly not able to manufacture the sound I hear.")

OTHER than the fact that there are great resources such as recording studios, talented musicians and arrangers, he and Lambchop have survived through very little contact with Nashville as an industry.

"There's no real interest in what Lambchop do in that respect. They don't see it as something that might create revenue for them! We have found a nice way to work - with small labels who are our friends. When we're ready to release a record, it's put out all over the world. That's something I don't have the wherewithal to do on my own. That's the extent of it. We've been able to play music in various parts of the world, and that's great, too. But it's not that we depend on it or anything. It's part of the whole thing, and I look upon it as getting the finished picture and hanging it up so that people can look at it."

Ask Wagner if Lambchop's aim is to restore the tradition of the past as quickly as they replace it, he'll reply, in the manner of a nifty DIY expert, that it's more of an extension than a restoration: "It's like learning from the past and getting it to become full of contemporary ideas. It's like the idea of a folk song passing from ear to ear, and as it goes through those changes, it reflects the time period or the person who is performing it at that time. Lambchop as mood music? I like that our sound has the ability to be present in a room and doesn't have to be focused on, or played so loud you can't ignore it. I liken it to be part of the environment."

Lambchop's latest album is Nixon (City Slang).