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All change for this Nashville institution – but magic still comes easily to Kurt Wagner, says Stevie Chick.
Lambchop Roundhouse, London
Stepping on stage, Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner looks, well, how Kurt Wagner always looks: trucker cap, neat workwear, like an unassuming carpenter popped out for a smoke. But longtime Lambchop-watchers will note some radical changes this time round. Once a crowded Nashville arkestra with pedal steel and horn section in tow, here Lambchop consist only of Wagner, a drummer, a bassist, and garrulous pianist Tony Crow, who fulfils the shy Wagner’s frontman responsibilities with a neat line in scabrous Donald Trump jokes. The setlist, meanwhile, draws mainly from recent album FLOTUS, which marked a determined step beyond for the everfluctuating ’Chop. Gone, save for ghostly echoes, are previous sonic touchstones: the gently twisted country ache of What Another Man Spills, Nixon’s dark, velvety soul, the past-midnight crooning of Is A Woman. Instead, Wagner occasionally straps on a guitar, but mostly his hands operate a voice-manipulating TC-Helicon Voicelive 2, which is sat on a kitchen stool. Wagner’s bandmates, meanwhile, re-score FLOTUS’s minimal, often-electronic music for live instrumentation, Crow engaging the graceful honks of sampled woodwind and stuttering synth of Writer with deft , conversational piano pitched somewhere between Erik Satie and Vince Guaraldi: remarkable but homespun, much like Lambchop. Indeed, for all the hitherto untaken paths FLOTUS wanders down, tonight every experiment, every unexpected influence (Wagner has said the roots of the new album’s sound lay in his ongoing appreciation for dirty south sounds, trap hip-hop and crunk) makes perfect sense, refracted through Wagner’s hazy, droll, poignant, often resonant lens. Ultimately, as alien as it sounds on the surface, it all feels very Lambchop. In part that’s because Wagner’s humanity always rises to the surface of even his most machine-conjured sounds. In a strange twist of creative synchronicity, his use of the TC-Helicon (which is like a Vocoder, only more so) echoes another of 2016’s finer albums, Bon Iver’s 22, A Million. In neither case are the electronics a gimmick, but where Bon Iver sought to make his vocals indecipherable, tonight Wagner transforms his gravelly tones into luminous transistor harmonies, gauzy and cobwebbed around his melodies. The Hustle, FLOTUS’s 18-minute closer, is shorn of a couple of minutes of its purposeful meander and calmly undulating electro rhythms tonight, but Wagner’s words – beginning with “I don’t want to leave you ever/And that’s a long, long time” – ring clear, uniting these songs: the grain of love lasting across decades. The songs invest domesticity with magic, and locate sweet, palpable truths underneath “romance” better than any since Yo La Tengo’s similarly hushed and brave …And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. And here, bathed in warm blue light, every note counts, especially the quietest ones. Swaying with his mikestand, Wagner seems lost in memories, in the sting and balm of nostalgia, the long and still unfolding story of his marriage to Mary Mancini. With a love like that, you know he should be glad.