Lambchop @ Gorilla, Manchester, 11 Aug

Reinvention? Yeah, you could say that – last year’s FLOTUS saw Lambchop veer away from their usual mixture of country-soul-lounge-whatever and lean more heavily on hip-hop-influenced electronic textures. We’re used to twanging Glen Campbell guitars, brass embellishments and sweeping strings, but the three-piece line-up that takes to the stage tonight is evidently not about to supply any of those. Banish all thoughts of Derek Smalls from your mind, however – this new direction is thoroughly welcome.

As you’d expect, tonight is most heavily reliant on their latest opus, and the singular thud of Writer’s spacious beat makes Kurt Wagner’s half-crooned, half-whispered vocal utterly captivating. He’s a compelling presence, not through ostentatious showmanship; rather his evident need to tell his stories shines through. The reverb-laden sound of the band lends an almost spectral element to proceedings, and over the course of the evening this leaves us ping-ponging between despair, hope and joy. A neat trick, if you can pull it off.

The more the set unfolds, the easier it becomes to spot signs of Lambchop’s signature tricks propping up Wagner’s immersion in new sounds: Matt Swanson’s basslines retain a subtle Superfly-esque funk, albeit paired up with silence, texture and mechanical precision as opposed to lush orchestration, and Tony Crow’s rippling jazz piano chords tie everything back into the band’s innate understanding of all things Americana. When you think of Lambchop in those terms, an absorption of hip-hop’s production techniques seems a logical part of their continued evolution.

Indeed, it’s still clearly a Lambchop show – things go awry at one point when a chuckling Wagner can’t get the beats to stop, and in between moments of virtuoso dazzle, Crow still has an exhaustive knowledge of gross, groan-worthy gags. That sense of familiarity comes to the fore during The Hustle, the first track released from FLOTUS and the one that truly announced their new ambitions.

On record, it’s an 18-minute journey through softly-stuttering beats and delicate whirrs, ebbing and flowing like the tide before breaking unexpectedly into the beautiful song at its core. Here, it’s stripped down to the song itself, reinvented as a four-minute tear-jerker and no less remarkable for that. Meanwhile, older piano ballads like The Decline of Country and Western Civilisation pulsate to newly-added robo-rhythms, with Wagner’s voice swathed in echo to the point that many of his lyrical proclamations are virtually inaudible. There’s something tremendously contrarian about reinventing not only your older material, but also your latest work, and the band pull it off with some style.

There’s previously been something spiritually comforting about Lambchop’s output; that’s not a charge you could level at their latest guise. Instead they ride us roughshod between emotions, taking advantage of a newfound grasp of the ethereal to catapult us from one extreme to the next. Forward-thinking and fully realised, this is pop at its most challenging, yet constantly striving for – and often exceeding – its transportive best.