While Ryan Adams was across the road in the Watergate Theatre being precious in front of a couple of hundred people, Lambchop's Paul Burch and some of his Nashville friends were whooping it up in a room you could just about swing a cat in. Burch has been called a New Traditionalist, a man who plays irony-free music to people who just want to lose themselves in gentle waves of melancholia.
With a fringed black suede jacket, a guitar and an accomplice, Fats Kaplin (imagine a very thin Catweazle with a permanent lip curl) on violin and pedal steel lap guitar, Burch is no faux alt.country guy. Rather, his songs blissfully recall the days when craftsmanship and songs ruled the country roost; there's a simplicity to them that occasionally transforms them into hymns. With Kaplin's precision pedal steel playing underpinning songs such as Forever Yours, Will Power and the beautiful Wire To Wire ("I can't take the salt from the sea and I can't take you from my heart"), the result is a performance of genuine emotional depth.
Things heat up a little when a couple of Burch's Nashville compadres join him on stage. Kaplin's wife, Kristi Rose, backs them on The Foolish Things The Lonely Do, a wonderful song title given even more resonance by Rose's ample, hair-teased charms and beguiling vixen wails. Then Jason Ringenberger arrives, shaking like a sackful of cats, sings Honky Tonk Blues, and sneaks off to the corner of the room he had been skulking in.
Diversions for sure, and good, clean fun ones. Yet they weren't intended to scupper what Burch had already achieved: a fusion of starkness and integrity, of anguished understatement and plain affection.
