Lambchop a Surreal Yet Real Delight

Mixing gentle, blue-eyed soul with quiet pop and touches of weird, spacey guitar, Nashville group Lambchop caught a Knitting Factory audience in a delicate net of intimate ruminations on Sunday.

Often tagged as alt-country, the band is the brainchild of singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Wagner, who has actually blended together not just country and folk but also elements of R&B;, jazz, orchestrated pop and high concept in six albums over the past eight years. Sunday’s 90-minute show drew largely from the new “Is a Woman,” a more restrained and delicate collection in which Wagner aims to sustain a single mood without lapsing into tedium.

Wagner and his quintet of piano, guitars, bass and drums carefully translated the album’s reserved instrumentation and emotional intimacy to the stage. The performance easily could have been monochromatic but instead drew listeners in with delicately woven sonic tapestries laid over Wagner’s solitary and vividly confessional musings on death, obsession, true devotion and self-understanding.

The painfully sincere, however, was tempered by the fairly surreal. Sitting in his trucker’s cap and glasses, sing-speaking in a matter-of-fact baritone, Wagner came across more a blue-collar Mr. Rogers than a world-weary crooner. Where the music was beautiful and poignant, his dry wit offered some laughs, and his sometimes crude way of putting things provided another odd twist that made Lambchop a strange delight.