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Lamb, "5"
Out of retirement, off of hiatus, back for another round—whatever you call it, Lamb's newest full length is as good as it is unexpected. After exploding into the world with a classic debut album, it has taken the band four more shots to come up with a worthy follow up, but they have finally done it.
Lamb's debut came out of nowhere and distilled many of the popular UK dance music styles from the mid 1990s into a single, wonderfully cohesive record. Although they were indebted to the Bristol trip hop scene and lumped in with others like Massive Attack and Portishead, tracks like "Cotton Wool" took cues from the nascent drum n bass world and demonstrated that Lamb was blazing their own path. The lead story back then was the May-December pairing of producer Andy Barlow and vocalist Lou Rhodes. Age isn't usually anything but a number, but in Lamb's case, this actually seems to matter.
On 5, Lamb's first new full length since 2003, Lou Rhodes' voice is noticeably huskier than it used to be and it's full of the kind of seasoning that young singer-of-the-week types only hope to gain some day. Likewise, Barlow's production remains current and relevant in an ever-changing landscape of popular electronic music, but he too has matured and there's nothing on 5 that feels like it is chasing a trend. After a few albums of mostly unremarkable material, the break seems to have done Lamb some good because 5 is full of truly noteworthy songs.
On "Another Language," Rhodes offers a meditation on the failure of language to capture issues of the soul over beats that stop, cut, and restart as if the music is trying to slow down as she tries to find the right words. "Wise Enough" seems like the album's most obvious single—a thoughtful torch song that plays to the band's ability to craft sweeping melodies and hummable hooks. It is the kind of song I have been longing for Lamb to record again since that first album, and while it recalls a little of "Gabriel" from 2001's What Sound the slightly older and wiser Lamb feels more accomplished.
An excursion into heavy guitar riffing lends the album a sore thumb of sorts in "Build A Fire," which probably served to scratch an itch somewhere in the band, but yielded a song that doesn't sound right on this record. Nearly everything else is golden though, with richly layered vocal production and enough variety to keep things from sounding too similar. "Rounds" is beautiful and might have been trampled all over by a band less confident in their ability to step out of the dance club arena to just craft lovely songs. Thankfully, Lamb gets to do whatever they want here.
Pre-orders of the album (that helped to fund its production) included a second disc of instrumentals, alternate mixes, and a track with Damien Rice called "Back to Beginning." Sometimes fans hang on to a band well past the sell-by date and pump money into an endless stream of middling records and cash-ins, but in this case, the fans may have helped to breathe some life into a band that still has some legs. I hope this comeback isn't limited to 5 since I'm more interested now to hear where Lamb will go than at any point since I first fell in love with "Cotton Wool."
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