*** Lambchop

NIXON

(Merge)

Just what this Nashville outfit's fifth album has to do with Tricky Dick isn't clear, except for the report that Lambchop singer Kurt Wagner liked a painting of our 35th president so much, he put it on the cover of the disc. But that title might also have something to do with Wagner's songs of troubling truths that lie beneath the façade of a misguided American Dream. There are lots of tracks here, after all, about settling down to home and hearth and then discovering things aren't quite what they seemed.

"Nashville Parent" finds Wagner overhearing squabbling neighbors and thinking about predatory owls; a girl betrayed by a philandering butcher boy hangs herself in her bedroom in "Butcher Boy." Everywhere, seemingly benign sentiments get turned on their heads. Even a gospely choir's exhortation of "C'mon progeny!" on the relentlessly chipper "Up with People" sounds funny -- and just a little creepy. And check out the cracked, weird elegance of "The Old Gold Shoe" that opens Nixon: over a butter-smooth country-folk melody, in a La-Z-Boy recliner of a voice, Wagner observes that "the world goes away/Each and every stinking day . . . " Ultimately, the songs -- filigreed with touches of vibraphone, piano, and pedal steel, and burnished with a backdrop of strings and horns -- suggest a fallen king and the sprawling kingdom of suburban decay he presided over.

-- Jonathan Perry

(Lambchop open for Yo La Tengo at the Somerville Theatre this Monday, February 28. Call 931-2000.)