Lambchop – St George's Church, Brighton 29/10/08

Tonight there is a new member in Lambchop’s rhythm section. Along side the bass and drums is a gilded figure of about 8 feet in height. It’s Jesus Christ. We are at St. George’s Church in Kemptown, which, frankly, is a contender for most spectacular venue in the country. It’s quite a setting for Kurt Wagner and co’s classic songwriting.

In more than one way St. George’s is a place of worship tonight, the audience sitting captivated by the personable Wagner, who is clearly at ease in his surroundings, playing to a home crowd. “It normally takes 15 years for a band to play an album from start to finish” he says, as the band do exactly that for the first half of the performance. TLOBF has already been singing the praises of OH (Ohio) and that trend is set to continue. Live, the record is elevated from simply another in a line of top draw releases to being a quietly subdued masterpiece of the songwriting art. On a bitterly cold night, Lambchop fill the church with warmth, the lilting country-soul sound enveloping the audience and raising the spirits. It would be very easy for this to become a little too serious, but luckily Wagner and his band are in engaging form.

Acting every inch the dry frontman to pianist Tony Crow’s funny man (although with jokes like “What’s a pirate’s favourite 70’s band? ARRRRgent!” the phrase ‘funny man’ might be a little misplaced) Wagner holds forth on everything from pirates to the prostate. In the process he reveals some of the ideas and meanings behind the new record, such as ‘Of Raymond’, which began after he felt uncomfortable with writing songs about ‘God’. Having remembered the phrase ‘God is Love’, logical progression moved him on to ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. So….if God is love, and everybody loves Raymond, then logically, Raymond must be God. So he simply replaced the names.

While the material from OH (Ohio) shone, it was the encore that really stole the show. Opening with ‘Give It’, Wagner’s collaboration with Xpress 2, the band move perfectly in to a cover of ‘Once In A Lifetime’ by Talking Heads, the normally docile frontman lunging forward, pointing vigorously at anyone and everyone in sight. After this sudden burst of energy, Lambchop proceeded to play select songs from the back catalog. As the evening wore to a close, Lambchop made the only real mistake of the evening. In introducing ‘Up With People’, he states ‘let’s play it real fast and get it over with’. Considering the surroundings, and the fact that the crowd had been eating out of his hand from the first note of the evening, it felt like an opportunity missed, the speeded up version stripping some of the life affirming soul power from the song, and ending the night on an anti-climax.

However, this proved to be only a minor blip in an otherwise spotless show.