I would give “The Song That Doesn’t End” a 3, maybe a 2.
[Video][Website]
[6.00]
[2]
Alfred Soto: The gulped vocals take getting used to, their sincerity so insistent that I expected emoticons on the track listing. But Lambchop have been at this crap for years, and the strong hook and way in which Kurt Wagner slips in remarks like “Looks like water comes from somewhere else” evinces their professionalism. This could so easily have lapsed into National-style rumbling melancholy. A point deducted, though, for the interminable string section.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Part of me is perfectly fine with this strings-and-lens-glare, Mister Rogers episode of a song. The other part keeps mentally replacing this with Bon Iver, even as it’s playing, while a third part gripes that this is the song that doesn’t end.
[6]
Iain Mew: I can easily envision the same coda being stuck on the end of an Elbow song and having me floating away in bliss. It doesn’t do the same here because the song itself is too sleepy and too opaque to set it up emotionally. Still, it’s pretty.
[5]
Brad Shoup: The singer operates in a world of mysterious provenance: water just appears, fires just start, he gets by with found coinage. Laconic and clipping as always, Wagner soon steps aside for a fantasia of strings, organ, and buried white noise. It’s streets ahead of Wilco’s recent Botoxed residency in suburbia. Still, Tweedy gets that “One Sunday Morning” doesn’t receive the video treatment. Chalk it up to Lambchop’s beloved willfulness, I guess;.
[7]
Michaela Drapes: I was already half in tears for the first few minutes, but when this turned into a sitar-fueled, Can-flavored meditation on Roxy Music’s “2HB”, I kind of fell apart entirely.
[10]