• Coming Up...

  • 21.10.09 - The Twilight Sad @ The Ruby Lounge, Manchester
  • 23.10.09 - ATP Movie Screening + Les Savy Fav @ The Deaf Institute, Manchester
  • 29.10.09 - Morrissey @ Leeds Academy
  • 07.11.09 - Yo La Tengo @ Manchester Academy 2
  • 12.11.09 - The Drones @ Night & Day Café, Manchester
  • 04.12.09 - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart @ Manchester Academy 2
  • 14-16.05.10 - ATP Festival curated by Pavement @ Butlins, Minehead

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  • The Ledge

  • Different Stars - Trespassers William
  • The Week That Was - The Week That Was
  • Forget The Night Ahead - The Twilight Sad
  • Blueberry Boat - The Fiery Furnaces
  • Popular Songs - Yo La Tengo

  • JustHipper

  • Different Stars - Trespassers William
  • Truelove's Gutter - Richard Hawley
  • Forget the Night Ahead - Twilight Sad
  • Alligator - The National
  • Bring It On - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

Gig Review:Lambchop at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 24th October 2006

With JustHipper still on her sickbed I ventured alone to Liverpool to see Lambchop in the relaxed setting of the Royal Philharmonic Hall. I managed to score a quite excellent parking spot just over the road from the venue (I’m developing an increasingly George Costanza-esque obsession with parking spots) though the guy in the car in front of me didn’t share my enthusiasm and called me an “anti-social fucker” as I got out of my car, even though he had made no indication that he had wanted to park there. Nice. I took my seat just in time to catch the support band, Hands Off Cuba, a three-piece ambient post-rock combo, one of whom, Will Tyler, is a fully paid up member of the ‘Chop while the other two are part of the current touring band. They took a while to get going and an even longer while to finish off but it was an interesting 25 minutes during which Tyler’s ambient washes of guitar noise were a constant while Scott Martin and Ryan Thomas provided bleeps and gurgles and assorted electronica as well as bursts of percussion and twanging guitar that reminded of the likes of Labradford and Tortoise. Whether they played a number of tracks or just one long one I have no idea. Not bad, though.

I’ve never seen Lambchop in a standing venue, they always play theatres and opera halls which is exactly how it should be. There were only eight members in the band for this gig, a record low for me, but they still filled out the large stage, with Tony Crow’s grand piano the centrepiece. After shuffling on to little fanfare they gently drifted into the amazing “Paperback Bible”, the highlight of their recent Damaged long player. It’s strange that a song that is effectively a list of mundane items on a Swap Shop style radio show should be so moving, but this is down entirely to Kurt Wagner’s wonderful honey ‘n cigarettes drawl, a voice that rarely raises above a whisper on recent recordings but which tonight is given to the occasional outburst of venomous volume. On the opener he spits out the line “there are others that are strapless, but this one’s cut above the knee” as if someone had just nicked his parking spot.

It wasn’t until the end of the third song that the audience got a chance to applaud the brilliance of the band thanks to the Hands Off Cuba guys and their between-song rumblings and to the politeness of the audience themselves. The sound quality was immaculate; you could hear every bleep, murmur, whisper, shimmer from the band, all expertly mixed by their own sound man who rightfully got a huge round of applause himself at the behest of Mr Wagner. Most of Damaged was played as expected and it sounded every bit as good live as it does on record. Surprisingly there was only a single track from their last album, the Aw C’mon/No You C’Mon double set and only one from Nixon, which was a shame although the swooning “Nashville Parent” was probably the highlight of the evening. There was the usual banter between Wagner and Tony Crow, as well as Crow’s occasional, awful jokes to keep us amused while the band tuned up between songs. The only downside of the evening was with the Is A Woman material. The last three times I’ve seen them they’ve played the first three tracks off that album. They are long, slow tracks and all three are quite similar, great when taken individually but a little tiresome when played next to each other. The readings “The New Cobweb Summer” and “My Blue Wave” may well have been fragile and intense but there was really no need for a meandering “The Daily Growl” having taken in those two lengthy gems. “Caterpillar” from the same album was concise in comparison and featured more impassioned and animated vocalising from the beseated frontman.

The inclusion in the set of three tracks from the band’s high watermark How I Quit Smoking album was a real bonus. “The Man Who Loved Beer” was radically reworked, so much so that it took a while for most people to realise what it was. “The Militant” was brooding and electric while the sole encore of “Theone” was a tender beauty in stark contrast to the bruising version of “The Decline Of Country And Western Civilization” that ended the main set. Despite my gripes about the Is A Woman material this was as good a Lambchop performance as I’ve seen, the addition of the Damaged material to the set has really freshened them up and the presence of the Hands Off Cuba guys has added an extra layer to their sound.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 11:36 pm by The Ledge and is filed under Gig Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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