There's an old bit of wisdom that says, "It's not the notes you play, it's the ones you don't."

In the case of Is A Woman, Lambchop honcho Kurt Wagner applies that adage to a 15-piece orchestra -- with an outcome that is so restrained, so quiet, it smashes you over the head in its subtlety.

Wagner made glorious use of his sprawling cast of Nashville players on 2000's Nixon, an album that, for all its down-home humility, blurred the divide between Nashville country and Memphis soul. Here he takes all that and pares it down into the sparsest of decoration for his abstract musings on love, loss, household pets, cigarette butts and architecture.

Tremolo-tinged guitars are stroked, a vibraphone floats by, piano tinkles at the other end of the room. No chord is struck in vain, no saxophone bleat mislaid.

And it's not as if the band is underused. You can almost hear them, hands hovering over keys and fingerboards and drum skins, waiting for the cue from Wagner. When things fall into place -- as with the ghostly choirs of I Can Hardly Spell My Name, the relatively funky and upbeat D. Scott Parsley, or the dreamy afterhours haze of the closing title track -- it's with seeming ease.

Mood and timing will no doubt be a factor in determining whether you find Is A Woman sublime or just extraordinarily sleepy. But, these days especially, it's downright poetic that the boldest statement Lambchop could have made was also the softest one.

Track Listing