Is a Woman is the sixth studio album from 2002. It seems incredible, listening to this album, that Lambchop were ever accused of being a country band... but then, Lambchop didn't used to make records that sounded like this. The immediate predecessor of Is A Woman, 2000's superb Nixon, saw Lambchop exploring a fascination with soul music, and the journey continues on Is a Woman. It is cut from the same cloth as Nixon, but it's just a little more threadbare. Where Nixon was a sequence of vast, shimmering electronic soundscapes, much of Is a Woman is carried by little more than piano and guitar. The songs are therefore left to fend for themselves, and they live up to the confidence placed in them. The lack of instrumental competition also allows Kurt Wagner's singular voice to sound even more vulnerable and wracked than usual: Bugs, for example, might well be the most underplayed lead vocal in the history of popular music. As a whole, Is a Woman is best thought of as a companion volume to Tindersticks' Can Our Love... and the Blue Nile's Peace at Last, a deadpan masterpiece.