Lambchop
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
For an alt-country band that’s moved through a wide range of influences over the last two decades, there’s something one-dimensional about Lambchop’s set tonight.
Having previously experimented with lounge music and vintage soul, the Nashville trio are currently promoting their new r&b-influenced album FLOTUS (For Love Often Turns Us Still).
Set against a backdrop of burbling electronica, drones and textured beats triggered by a laptop, Kurt Wagner’s lyrics about enduring love and colliding raindrops are delivered through heavy vocal processing.
It’s a sound that Bon Iver played with on the album 22, A Million but the result here is much more subtle, so much so that the contemporary hip-hop artists that Wagner has cited wouldn’t even recognise their influence on a track such as In Care Of 8675309, the most traditional offering tonight, with its beats playing over Tony Crow’s cocktail piano.
More typical of their new direction, where looped rhythms are integrated with Wagner’s countrified guitar strums, are the elegiac The Hustle and Gone Tomorrow.
Affecting when heard in isolation, when repeated over the course of 90 minutes the use of auto-tune becomes a distraction and the pace shows minimal variety.
The band have nonetheless created such a distinctive sound that their set-closing cover of Prince’s When You Were Mine is virtually unrecognisable.
Replacing the new wave funk of the original with a gentle croon, they make the tale about a love triangle sound strangely appropriate for what Crow jokes is “date night for a lot of people.”