Lambchop's reissued What Another Man Spills hints at their imminent excellence

Reissued on vinyl to mark the 1998 album’s 20th anniversary, What Another Man Spills finds Lambchop inching tantalisingly close to realising the plush, expansive countrypolitan-got-soul sound of Nixon, the masterful 2000 album that would go on to upgrade the Nashville collective’s fortunes dramatically and remains a high point of the alt country movement. Yet there are jarring missteps and spots of idling here, resulting in an uneven album that would almost certainly have relegated Lambchop to the obscure cult-indie oddity file, had bandleader Kurt Wagner not found the capacity to turn things up to 11 (only quietly, this being Lambchop after all) for the follow-up.

That 1998 model Lambchop were keen to ditch their wise-cracking alt country roots is made blatantly obvious with the album’s choice of cover versions. Starring an expansive string section on top of the band’s full 14-person sprawl, an impossibly lush and beautifully nuanced (have so many musicians ever managed to play so delicately?) take on Curtis Mayfield’s swooning “Give Me Your Love” remains a jaw-dropping testament to genre barriers crumbling into very fine dust, especially when coming from a band that had usually been described as country (with one prefix or another attached) up until this point. It’s incredible to think the band - aided by producer Mark Nevers - managed to achieve such a luxurious audiophile equivalent of thick shag carpeting on a shoestring budget. Having pulled off a resounding unlikely victory, Lambchop push their luck with an unnecessary remake of Frederick Knight’s Stax classic “I’ve Been Lonely for So Long” which takes Wagner’s cloud-scaling falsetto to the very edge of its range.

Similar win-some, lose-some vibe prevails for the rest of these 12 tracks. Much of the quieter material is simply sublime. The dialogue between a nimbly picked guitar, Wagner’s warm, conversational mutter (here’s a singer who could, and in a manner of speaking has - the lyrics of 2006’s impossibly moving “Paperback Bible” were inspired by classified ads - sing the phonebook and break hearts) and mournful trumpet on opener “Interrupted” hints heavily at the heartbreaking and -warming pathos the band would squeeze from Wagner’s everyday observations on the more tightly arranged and melodically resonant future classics a la Nixon, Damaged (2006) and Mr. M (2012). Enriched with echoes of the Nixon's low-lit splendour, the muted, dust-blown despair of total K.O. pair “Life #2” (written for the band by East River Pipe’s F.M. Cornog) and “N.O.” is a must-hear for anyone with any interest in Lambchop.

Elsewhere, attention tends to wonder, especially once the tempo picks up, resulting in a portrait of a band who are becoming increasingly aware of the multi-colour widescreen potential that would be realised in full on Nixon, but who occasionally get stuck on a musical equivalent of a poorly tuned black and white TV set.