Pitchfork

Lambchop seem like one the most domesticated bands around. Maybe it's because their sound, despite the fullness that comes from so many members, retains its subtlety and subdued complexity with the loose feel of a pick-up band among friends. Or maybe it's because in songs like "Nashville Parent" and "The New Cobweb Summer", singer/lyricist Kurt Wagner always seems to be wandering his house, thinking deep thoughts about dogs and sponges, and doling wryly homespun wisdom like some brilliantly addled Lewis Grizzard. He finds inspiration in such housebound activities as walking the dog, verbally sparring with the missus, and drinking in the backyard. In a sense, this is the flipside of the typical country concerns of cheatin' spouses and barstool life, playing up not the heartache that haunts most songs, but the mundanity of the day-to-day grind that everyone faces-- as well as the small particulars that make it worthwhile.

On the two volumes of The Decline of Country and Western Civilization-- one from German label City Slang and the other from the band's American label Merge-- Lambchop gather a gaggle of rarities and oddities, tracks from label samplers and early attempts at songs that would later find homes on What Another Man Spills, Nixon, or Is a Woman. Technically, most are the A- and B-sides from six years of seven-inch singles, but they have the feel of songs stacked for years in the garage behind two decades of National Geographics or lost behind the bedroom bureau, gathering dust with someone's wallet-size school portrait. There is some overlap between the two tracklists (as well as with the 2001 comp Tools in the Dryer, which spans 1987-2000); nine songs appear on both discs, counting two different versions of "Your Life as a Sequel" and "Alumni Lawn" and two different excerpts from the out-there collaboration "Two Kittens Don't Make a Puppy". For the most part, however, despite these redundancies, the two volumes don't cancel each other out, but rather complement each other nicely.

Not that there's an official retrospective to compare them to, but these compilations form an engaging alternative Lambchop history, telling more about the band's experimentation and evolution, its range and reach, than any "best of" ever could. As such, both Declines sound better even as they play up the band's lucid contradictions. These songs have the feel of a specific Nashville setting, though they sound like nothing else that comes out of that city. Lambchop's music is on country's map, but they take a winding route via 1970s funk and soul, folk, Americana, and late-80s college rock. These compilations run the gamut from rambunctious, lowish-fi numbers like "Nine", with its vocalized rhythm guitar lines, and "Loretta Lung", to more polished, reedy-- more Lambchoppy-- tracks like "Playboy, the Shit" and "The Gettysburg Address", which...how the hell has this stayed unreleased for so long? The opposable sore thumbs on both volumes are two excerpts from a longer piece called "Two Kittens Don't Make a Puppy", which is a collaboration of sorts with Mac McCaughn of Superchunk/Merge Records and Unrest's Mark Robinson. A jumble of mechanized drumbeats, squirrelly trumpet, and nonsense vocals, each section manages to be just grating enough to be funny, then a little bit more grating.

The City Slang version of Decline gets the extra one-fifth point because the Merge version doesn't have "Soaky in the Pooper", which is more than just a great title even though it doesn't have to be. Originally appearing on 1994's I Hope You're Sitting Down, it's a hazy story-song about a bad trip, progressing from stupor to paranoia to death. The song reveals Wagner at his clever best, mixing offbeat imagery with oddball wordplay. No songwriter can milk as much humor from a simple aabb rhyme scheme. "Suckers and Smuckers, wake up you little fuckers," he sings on "Smuckers", and it's easy to imagine a grouchy parent muttering to himself as he stumbles through a kid's messy room. He's a poet of the grump: on "Moody Fucker" he savors the saucy vulgarity of the title, rolling out that "fuck" syllable defiantly, as if he's just been told to watch his mouth in front of the kids. Such moments accumulate into a genial familiarity: Wagner could be your drinking buddy, or your dad, or yourself in your forties. That homey sensibility plays up the collections' junk-drawer aesthetic, excusing their clutter as a sort of shaggy-dog charm and making their inconsistency not only tolerable, but possibly the entire point of this project.