100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #80 Lambchop – Up With People

Released: 2000

Now it seems the only way to become a famous musician or band is on the internet, but there were times when this was a rarity, and Lambchop it felt like were one of the first to be crowned with that dubious honour. Without it, or say a decade earlier, Kurt Wagner’s loose collective of up to 15 collaborators – some of which he freely admitted couldn’t actually play a note on anything – may well have remained in their tiny, tight knit indie circle and adored solely by the inkies.

Either way. the Nashville whatever you want to call it developed slowly in that town’s rhinestone-obsessed petri-dish, evolving from the ambitious double debut album I Hope You’re Sitting Down/Jack’s Tulips to 1997’s Thriller, which lasted exactly 33 minutes and 33 seconds. Wagner had plenty of time to excercise his wicked sense of humour in the process, but by the turn of the century and Nixon many more were listening to his growled amalgam of lo-fi country, soul and indie abstraction, and compete with sublime cover art and just as modems began to rattle across America, it struck a chord way off the bible belt.

Up With People, for what it’s worth, sounded almost British in a weirdly off kilter way. It was the kind of thing Guy Garvey may have been idly dreaming about making in the future, except there was a grizzled vulnerabilty in the air that Elbow and their friends have since always struggled to truly reach. On it a brass section parped in satisfied tones, a guitar pivoted around a couple of lazy, warm chords, whilst a choir gave Wagner the sound of a lay preacher singing in cut off shorts and trucker’s cap. We might never even have known about it, but for the new invention of some zeroes and ones.