Local starter then the meat course

By STEPHEN JEWELL

From its ever-changing lineup to its core audience, which ranges from traditional rock fans to dance aficionados looking for something different, everything about Nashville's Lambchop appears to be fluid, which is perhaps how the band's laidback frontman Kurt Wagner - the only constant in the group's 17-year history - likes it.

"As long as there's me and one other person in the group then it's Lambchop," says Wagner, who says the band's once-14-strong membership currently numbers around a more manageable five.

Among the 20-plus musicians who have passed through Lambchop's ranks over the years has been New Zealander David Kilgour (of the Clean and solo fame), who played as part of the band during a recent American tour.

"I met David when he came over to play with Yo La Tengo," says Wagner. "We did the opening-band slot for part of that tour. David and I ended up hitting it off so we got him to come back to America to do a tour with us."

Kilgour and The Heavy Eights will be supporting Lambchop tonight.

"If you ask me, it really should be the other way round," laughs Wagner, who says he asked Kilgour to join him on stage. "I've extended the invitation as I always do, so we'll have to see how confident he is."

Wagner will be touring as part of a five-piece and the band's set list will mostly derive from Lambchop's last album, Is A Woman, the more subdued successor to their breakthrough sixth album Nixon, with a few new songs thrown in for good measure. "I've been trying to write a song a day," says Wagner. "Just to see what comes out of it. So far, it's been productive."

Musically, Lambchop are also hard to pin down and, as band member Jonathan Marx writes in the sleeve notes for the recent best-of collection Tools In The Dryer, Wagner does not wear the standard alt-country tag well.

"I think you have to call us something," he says. "It just doesn't help me as a consumer. But would you call Mercury Rev or The Flaming Lips alt-country? For me, music would be good and good music even better. It's your job [as a journalist] to describe music and, frankly, I don't envy you at all. That's a rough job. How do you describe something that isn't all that describable? You can describe a film or a painting as fitting into a certain genre but music is much tougher."

Wagner is also keen that not too much is read into the fact that Lambchop hail from Nashville, the home of country and western music, although he does recommend that people visit the brand-spanking-new Country Music Hall of Fame in the Is A Woman and Tools in the Dryer sleeve notes.

"Nashville is where I live so I'm sure it has an influence," says Wagner, who has previously described country music as "hick soul music".

However, Wagner struggles to explain Lambchop's appeal to the clubbing generation, which has seen dance music publication Jockey Slut describe Nixon as "a panacea to all those repetitive beats, a soothing balm to a hard night's partying that sounds wicked coming down at six in the morning".

"Maybe it's the soul thing," says Wagner, who covered Curtis Mayfield's Give Me Your Love on Nixon. However, it was London duo Zero 7's sublime remix of Up With People (included on Tools in the Dryer) that first introduced Lambchop to the dance world. It's something that Wagner is taking advantage of - he's working on a collaboration with recent New Zealand visitors X-Press 2 and also contributed to the best track on Morcheeba's last album, Charango, the strangely titled What New York Couples Fight About.

"I think the title was me," laughs Wagner. "Ross and Paul from Morcheeba kept coming to my shows and I met them without knowing they were in Morcheeba. They just kept showing up and eventually they asked me to work on a song with them."

Unfortunately, when Wagner travels Downunder, he'll have to leave at home one of Is A Woman's main influences, which is not actually a woman, but his dogs.

"I have three of them, a Weimaraner, a labrador and a basset hound," says Wagner. They always seem to be around and certainly had an impact on the record."

Performance

* Who: Lambchop, David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights

* Where: Kings Arms, Newton

* When: Tonight