Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.” It’s a lovely film, and a rare one in that it manages to precisely but subtly analyse both the music and the personality of Russell – understanding that both are obviously interdependent – through a bunch of very intimately-handled interviews. The director, Matt Wolf, resorts to that old trick of wavering landscape shots to complement the archive clips of Russell. But even the tracking shots of Midwestern cornfields, or of generic “solitary man on the Staten Island ferry in headphones” are executed with a grace that’s much more evocative than these sort of things usually are. Cornfields apart, anyway, Russell emerges from the movie as a fascinating figure, consumed by music to such a degree that he seems in part too paralysed to be able to finish and release much of it. Wolf doesn’t fixate on one of Russell’s myriad styles in particular, but discreetly makes connections between the different strands he pursued: the avant-garde compositions; the plaintive voice-and-cello experiments; the kinetic disco tracks he pursued; the tentative forays into singer-songwriter territory. As sundry auspicious talking heads – including Allen Ginsberg (archival, obviously) and Philip Glass - make clear, Russell’s constant and dogged blurring of the margins between pop and the avant-garde were one of his greatest strengths. David Toop (the only journo featured, mercifully) points out at one stage something like, if you listen to your music in a certain way, the noises start displaying affinities that transcend apparently oppositional genres. If that’s overly theoretical, even a cursory listen to Russell’s music – or a listen in the movie to the powerful testimonies of his parents and his lover, Tom Lee (Russell died in 1992) – should make clear that what he did was actually immensely humane. That warmth and vulnerability comes across very strongly on “Love Is Overtaking Me”, the latest batch of Russell’s unreleased material (there’s something like 800 reels of the stuff) to see the light of day. This lot privileges Russell’s most accessible side, ostensibly rooted in a tradition of singer-songwriting that one suspects must have been anathema to some of his stricter leftfield cohorts. “Love Is Overtaking Me” apparently draws on material from the early ‘70s right up to his death, and involves a bunch of his rapidly-aborted “band” projects (The Flying Hearts, plus some I’ve never heard of; The Sailboats, Bright & Early, the excellently-named Turbo Sporty). Some of the stuff was purportedly recorded by John Hammond, of all people, but I don’t have the details on which is which. No matter. Everything kind of fits together here, from the tiny, beautiful country-folk sketches where Russell sounds a little like James Taylor, through to marginally sturdier band pieces, where his connections with The Modern Lovers are fairly apparent. Occasionally, he sounds unnervingly like Jose Gonzales, which can be a bit disconcerting, but unlike Gonzales, these songs don’t feel like rote exercises in heart-on-sleeve folksy songwriting. And constantly, there’s that blurring of genres: the way “Goodbye Old Paint” begins like one of his “Instrumentals” fragments (as collected on “First Thought, Best Thought”, my favourite Russell music), then evolves into a perfect little country song; or how “What It’s Like” has a languidly soulful undertow, as a horn section artfully manoeuvres into the space between the electric guitar, the organ and Russell’s wry, semi-spoken vocal about loving a preacher in the tall grass (someone’s just said it sounds like “Wonderful Tonight”, actually). There are songs which recall some of “Calling Out Of Context”, maybe, like “Planted A Thought” where his voice and cello are tentatively tracked by dance machine beats. And then there’s "Eli", which features his frail high voice and cello, and appears to be about a dog. This one’s in “Wild Combination”, and it’s extraordinary.

Coming to work this morning past the giant Budweiser posters of William Tyler, it occurred to me it was really high time I wrote about “OH (Ohio)”. I guess there may have been some reluctance on my part to commit to this one, possibly because I’ve found the last couple – maybe more – Lambchop albums so disappointing, and also because, clearly, none of their slowly insinuating records merit rushed judgments. But anyway, “OH (Ohio)” seems to be a quietly re-energised – though I’m not sure that’s ever quite the right word for Lambchop – album. Of late, they’ve seemed weary; a tentative, beaten musical treatment might have fitted the tales of illness on “Damaged”, but the record still sounded exhausted beyond thematic usefulness. And while I became infatuated with “Is A Woman” (usefully, since I was writing an extensive piece on the band for Uncut at the time), I can’t pretend I’ve played it much in the intervening years. It’s hard to identify exactly what makes “OH (Ohio)” such a (dread phrase) return to form – after all, Kurt Wagner and his bandmates deal in such microscopic nuances that I guess a lot of casual listeners would be struggling to spot the differences. Often, though, this one reminds me of that very first album, “Jack’s Tulips”, in that it rekindles the freshness, even the discreet playfulness, of Lambchop. There’s a lightness of touch rediscovered here, from the opening supper-club shuffle of “Ohio” on. Perhaps one of the problems with recent records has been that the sheer strangeness of Lambchop’s original sound – the hazy, lightly-sketched, characterful synthesis of country, soul and so on – seemed to become over-familiar, even oppressive. This time, though, it works again, as Wagner navigates his rueful way through excellent songs like “Slipped Dissolved And Loosed”, “Popeye” (such a beautiful phased, dynamic coda to this one) and the gorgeously horn-flecked “Of Raymond” with, if not vigour, then a good deal more purpose. Apparently, Wagner has finally come to terms with the fact that Lambchop is ostensibly a vehicle for his songs, which might explain the heightened focus. But it’s weird, because the remorseless spotlight on his disintegrating voice, as on “Damaged” and “Is A Woman” especially, doesn’t feel quite so discomforting on “OH (Ohio)”. The personnel around him have almost completely changed since Lambchop’s early days, but the way they track his ambulatory melodies has all the customary subtlety, but perhaps not the virtual invisibility of those problem records. We can speculate about renewed vigour in the wake of life-threatening illness, of course, and the gentle humour that feeds through “National Talk Like A Pirate Day” may well be evidence of that. But maybe there is no great secret to why a band return to form sometimes, other than that the muse haphazardly drives them to create a batch of better songs. And while I went off on some mild anti-tune rant the other day (check the comments at the bottom), it’s nice to have a Lambchop album with some hooks again, perhaps most strikingly “A Hold Of You”. There’s a palpable, albeit suitably mature, desire to flex muscle on parts of “OH (Ohio)”: along with “National Talk Like A Pirate Day”, “Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr” is one of Lambchop’s rare – and more successful than most – attempts to pick up a bit of speed. It’s not “Up With People”, but it’s not bad, either. A grower, then. It’ll be interesting to see how these songs turn out when Wagner plays them solo at his Club Uncut gig next Wednesday, on September 10. James Blackshaw and Cate Le Bon supporting, remember.