It’s a pared back version of Lambchop which appears onstage at the Brudenell Social Club on a summer’s evening consisting chiefly of drizzle. Previous incarnations of the band have numbered as many as fifteen musicians and even a full orchestra, but tonight laconic lynchpin Kurt Wagner makes do with piano and bass, and what support Roxanne de Bastion describes as his ‘gadgets and sorcery.’
Lambchop may hail from country music’s spiritual home of Nashville, Tennessee, but there is nothing contrived or saccharine about the music they make together. Wagner’s lyrics, delivered with his customary honeyed mahogany growl, are frankly too perplexing, too soused in barfly cynicism, too damned funny – a dig at country royalty Garth Brooks raises a laugh – for Grand Ol’ Opry temperaments.
Tonight’s set list comprises material drawn largely from last year’s FLOTUS, an album which found Wagner experimenting with hip hop drum machine patterns, processed vocals and layered electronic sounds. ‘What once was something I found sonically threatening or alarming was now nuanced and had developed into something soulful,’ he says of the band’s new direction. ‘It’s a new sound for us, but represents the openness of a simpler line up that we’ve become in the last few years.’
After the relative chill minimalism of previous effort Mr M, the new stuff is more a loose-hipped electro return to the soul infusions of Nixon and What Another Man Spills, thanks in no small measure to the probing funk bass of Matt Swanson and some modal jazz shapeshifting from pianist, Tony Crow.
This is not to suggest that Wagner is in danger of repeating himself. FLOTUS is a glorious act of reinvention twelve albums in. The melodies are as low-key gorgeous as ever, the words as arch and melancholic, but the performance – on album standouts Directions to the Can and JFK for example – is reinvigorated and otherworldly, buffed to a twitchy electronic sheen. On the non sequitir addled Writer (‘Once there was a peanut in the butter’), Wagner allows his heavily treated vocals to loop and gather about him, while the title track shimmers and stutters, a meditation on opportunities lost and relationships soured.
The driving motorik insistence of incredible eighteen minute workout The Hustle with its line ‘it goes without saying we’ll never work in this town again,’ divines the road less travelled between David Bowie albums Station to Station and Low. Of the old songs, Decline of Country and Western Civilisation from 2006’s Damaged particularly benefits from the leaner setting, scrubbing up nicely once stripped of its original spit and bombast.
Less expected are the shapes Wagner throws in the area: an unapologetic emulation of his newly minted hip-hop credentials perhaps, though the overall effect is nearer Poochie than Snoop Dogg to be fair. He and waggish sidehand Crow trade jokes with the Brudenell audience about the places they have never heard of that the band’s agent has booked for this UK tour. Nottingham is one and more improbably Manchester another – though here they might simply be playing up to the partisan Yorkshire crowd.
Wagner’s trademark scratchy strumming style is to the fore in the encore rendition of gorgeous eleven minute album opener In Care of 8675309. It is one of the handful of occasions tonight where he straps on his guitar. Performed as a personal favour to someone’s mum, the song is an unusual choice as a dedication. ‘It’s kind of angry,’ admits Wagner by way of introduction, ‘so don’t blame us if you get all fidgetty!’
For the final moments as he plays bathed in the slow revolving fractal mosaic of a glitterball, the Lambchop frontman conjures a memory of his sorely missed alt-country contemporary Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse renown. It hangs there ghostlike in the air, a hit that feels like a kiss. It is the perfect point on which to end – the old matchbook trick that ‘steadies the unsteadiness of the lopsided conversation.’
Lambchop performed at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds. Tour continues. Further details here.