Jewel Box Release
Tracklist
1. The Daily Growl
2. The New Cobweb Summer
3. My Blue Wave
4. I Can Hardly Spell My Name
5. Autumn's Vicar
6. Flick
7. Caterpillar
8. D. Scott Parsley
9. Bugs
10. The Old Matchbook Trick
11. Is A Woman
Wagner had sat down on his Nashville back porch, with just a laptop and his dogs for company, and begun to write. What emerged was an album of pronounced, subtle beauty that would—to everyone’s surprise, not least his band’s—extend Lambchop’s reach even further. Despite its change in direction, it received an otherwise even warmer response, matched across Europe and, indeed, beyond. Soon, the band was performing to sold-out audiences in similarly grandiose theatres across the continent. They’ve never looked back since.
Such shows helped underline the record’s central aesthetic, which was that Is a Woman was a very quiet album best heard loud. As Crow and his colleagues shaped a musical landscape of sophisticated, uncluttered melancholy, Wagner’s lyrics were given unprecedented space, allowing every guttural detail of every single word to be heard, revealing densely poetic texts as intimate as they were incisive, as comic as they were confessional. The sweet sensitivity of “The Daily Growl” concluded with the trenchant observation that “I guess it’s right / To love the girls who fight / Off our manly acts of desperation” while the touching romance of “Bugs” spoke of how “a whispered comment, or a compliment is said / And you take her hand and you gesture toward the bed / I can’t believe this feels this good.”
