Here are two more tracks from the new Lambchop compilation. “Mr. Crabby,” a single from 1997, is a pleasant but fairly trivial effort. But I’m very fond of “The Distance From Her to There,” on which Kurt Wagner pulls out his extraordinarily strange (and, to me, appealing) falsetto, inspired by Curtis Mayfield but dry and forced, with none of the smooth suavity of his hero. This song appears on the band’s 2000 record “Nixon,” all decked out in countrypolitan finery, and it’s nice to hear this more relaxed and quiet-spoken alternate version.
— T.B.
