Evolving and rotating around songwriter Kurt Wagner over the past 30 years, Nashville’s Lambchop find whole new magical ways to be Lambchop on For Love Often Turns Us Still, otherwise known as FLOTUS, one of the year’s most beautiful albums. With humanistic playfulness intact and singular hyper-articulated delivery present, Wagner spends the entire album processing his voice through a vocoder and mixing human and electronic beats. The result is an album that makes Lambchop sound even less like anybody else than ever before. With the vocoder, Wagner’s voice becomes an even more beautiful instrument, reaching for soulful falsetto amid chopped vocal samples (“Directions to the Can”), speak-singing (“Writer”), and uncovering new spectrums of evocative and wordless coos (“Relatives #2”). But what makes the new, weird Lambchop special is the old, weird Lambchop, especially Tony Crow’s countrypolitan piano wending through the songs like a running commentary. Grown from Wagner’s electronic HeCTA side project, FLOTUS’ song structures open up (“JFK”), expand to epic length (the 18-minute “The Hustle”), sometimes just sound like Lambchop (“In Care of 8675309”) and remain a constant surprise. Like all Lambchop, each feels more like an art object than a song, filled with intent and ideas and warmth, and carrying far more than itself.