There must come a point when the attempt to organise 14 musicians becomes an insufferable chore. It seems that Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner reached it just as he started writing his band's sixth album, Is a Woman. His new songs are essentially arranged for piano and his own acoustic guitar: a spartan combination after the lavish orchestrations of the album's predecessor, Nixon.
In Shepherd's Bush, Wagner is joined by just two performers: pianist Tony Crow and producer Mark Nevers on distorted keyboards. They're here to showcase the new songs, even though these have dominated Lambchop's live sets for a good nine months now. The venue's plush chandeliers and moulded ceilings reflect the mature, graceful mood of the music, particularly Crow's elegant piano melodies. But less attention has been paid to the room's acoustics than its decoration, and throughout the sound is curiously flat. Wagner's distinctively percussive guitar-playing is rendered blunt and thudding, while his voice seems to splutter from the microphone, like an old car engine that rasps but never quite sparks up.
If the limitations of Wagner's musicianship are exposed without the full band, so too are the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of his subdued, subtle songs. The Curtis Mayfield influence emerges in the soul-tinged Flick and the wonderful strutting notes at the start of The Old Match Book Trick. It suddenly becomes clear how experimental this music is, as Nevers's weird electronic wheezes and shimmers form a bold, alien counterpoint to the gentle piano. And Wagner's muted vocals, his absorbing, unfathomable lyrics, are unmasked.
Like Raymond Carver, Wagner finds the momentous in the mundane: he sings of flicking cigarette butts in the morning, stroking the dog's jaw, and the match book that props up a table and "steadies the lopsided conversation", capturing a life in each verse. His face seems permanently creased in an enigmatic smile. It could be at a memory in the lyric, in wonder at the audience's reaction, or with secretive pleasure at the sound of his slimline band.
