“Your Fucking Sunny Day” – Lambchop
(Words/music: Kurt Wagner, available on Thriller, Merge Records 1997)

This is the last in my series of posts about bands on Merge Records (thank you for indulging me) and I planned on yesterday’s being the final one, but I need to write about the single best moment of my week in Chapel Hill.  I anticipated that Superchunk would be awesome and they didn’t disappoint.  However, I was not expecting the best set of the week to come from Lambchop, the musical project of former floorer Kurt Wagner.  Until I started receiving the SCORE boxset earlier this year, I couldn’t name a single Lambchop song.  I soon fell for “Your Fucking Sunny Day” on Phil Morrison’s mix, at first because of the title and then because of its strangely addictive melody.  It’s a difficult song to pin down – it’s kind of funky, kind of orchestrated.  The most compelling part of the song, for me, is the way Kurt Wagner sings it – holding out certain phrases, letting some notes sneak out as a yelp, and still staying faithful to the melody the entire time.  In three and a half minutes, Wagner gave a sense that his personality ran deeper than the cursing in his song titles and the humor mentioned in every synopsis I read after listening to this song.

None of this, however, prepared me for what I saw last Friday night at Merge’s anniversary show.  Wagner came on stage backed by ten musicians (which I’m told is half as many as accompanied him at the Merge 15th anniversary) and played a 40 minute set that left half of the crowd a dancing mess and the other half petrified in awe.  I expected Wagner’s songs to shuffle from genre to genre, but I didn’t expect every different style to have such life and enthusiasm.  The slow songs sounded gorgeous (and, when I could make out the words, melancholy and heartbreaking), and the lively songs swung like a jazz trio after weeks of rehearsals.  Over a forty five minute set, Wagner and his band made us laugh, tugged at our heartstrings, and made jaws hit the floor.  Appropriately, Lambchop garnered the loudest, most enthusiastic ovation to end their set of the week, with Wagner beaming beneath his thick frames and trucker hat.  I’m convinced that the people in the audience had no clue what was coming when Lambchop was introduced.  By the end of the set, Wagner leaped out of his seat when shouting out the lyrics to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” seeming like a man speaking in tongues (and, appropriately, one-upping David Byrne’s evangelical preacher performance in the music video).  It was a surreal moment that ended a memorable set – one that melted even the most cynical of hearts.  I’ve been surprised by shows before and naively thought that it couldn’t happen again – not with the free flow of information and the ease of acquiring music on the internet.  I was wrong, and went home ready to explore Wagner’s catalog.  I’m excited to digest his albums and, perhaps, be surprised again.  Still, I’m not sure any record can duplicate what I experienced in person last Friday.

More on Lambchop: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm