Music / americana
Review: Lambchop, The Fleece
When Kurt Wagner released Lambchop’s twelfth album FLOTUS last year the news that he would be singing through auto-tune triggered alarm bells among the faithful.
However, this turned out to be no cause for alarm – as with all that he does, this maverick of the alt-country genre adapted it to fine and beautiful effect on the hypnotically mesmerising moods of that record.
Here tonight a big slice of FLOTUS’ gentle, subtle, country funk is performed, the soul of his material combining with electronica to produce something uniquely Lambchop-ish, slow-burning and gorgeous. Yes, Wagner’s voice may be filtered through heavy vocal processing on many numbers but we still get the marvellous gist of it all. It works.
is needed now More than ever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W0rpQx_MXE
Starting with the introductory computerised blip blips and quirkiness of Writer and the gentle funk of Old Masters, we then get a pared-down version of an 18-minute epic from the new album, The Hustle. The hiccupping electronica is replaced by guitar, Tony Crow’s wonderfully effective piano and Matt Swanson’s bass.
These three Nashville musicians produce the understated, warm, jazzy, country-hued, floaty funk flavours and nuances that Wagner leads through intelligence and guile, and a lot of humour. The between-song banter between him and the wisecracking deadpan of Tony Crow as hilarious and sharp as they’ve always been.
In between the new stuff the garrulousness and exuberance of old numbers like The Decline of Country and Western Civilisation and Give It are tempered down to basics and given a quieter substance, and the beautiful country soul of Gone Tomorrow sits well alongside the ethereal funk of JFK and the wonderfully colourful piano rhythms of the last number Harbor Country.
They encore with the title track of FLOTUS – which stands for For Love Often Turns Us Still, a paean to the love Wagner has for his wife – and a gentle reimagining of Prince’s When You Were Mine, joined on vocals by the support act Roxanne De Bastion.
Quietly and ecstatically unique and sublime…
Main photo by Elfyn Griffith
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