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So much has changed since Kurt Wagner first led Lambchop out of his downstairs basement where they used to rehearse, at his house in a quiet Nashville suburb. Back then they were a ramshackle outfit, a charming drinking buddy collective taking the music they heard around them in Music City – the butt of jokes amongst the critical elite at the time – and mixing it with the music that they loved, Wagner topping it all off with his weird, abstract lyrics. They were a curiosity: the fact that anyone would want to release the album they recorded as great a surprise to the band as anyone. Perhaps, if it had not been picked up by a small group of fervent fans and critics seduced by what the band archly called 'The New Sound Of Nashville', it would have been their only album. Yet now, almost two decades later, Lambchop return with their tenth, "OH (Ohio)" which continues the Lambchop tradition, where each successive record represents a new stage in the evolution of their distinctive sound. It's a natural process which has seen them progress from their shambolic early recordings on "Jack's Tulips" / "I Hope You're Sitting Down" to the off kilter pop experimentalism of "What Another Man Spills" on to the joyful soul of "Nixon" and then, pointedly, its polar opposite, the piano-led minimalism of "Is A Woman". Most recently "Damaged" saw Wagner leave the porch from which he had viewed the world for so long and start looking inside himself, his dark meditations on mortality and human frailty matched by a band capable of taking delicacy to delicious new heights. "OH (Ohio)" finds Kurt delving deeper into himself – the songs were road-tested on a Wagner solo tour of the UK and Europe in 2007. This time, Wagner has chosen not to highlight the album's lyrics so as to preserve the integrity of the songs as whole entities, not parts.

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