The Musical Box

Now this is what you want from a WoodSongs show: two richly inventive bands representing different cultural and geographical perspectives. It was as if they their side-by-side billing was almost accidental.

scotland's tannahill weavers

First up last night at the program’s weekly Kentucky Theatre taping was Scotland’s Tannahill Weavers, a regular visitor to local clubs and folk festivals during the ‘80s but absent from Central Kentucky for nearly 18 years. Luckily, little has changed. Roy Gullane, Phil Smillie and Les Wilson summoned a hearty vocal blend that propelled the traditional turns of The Highland Lassie while Colin Melville provided a wake-up-the-neighbors blast on the Highland bagpipes during the title medley from the band’s 2003 album Arnish Light. Flutes and whistles harmonized with fiddle while guitar and bouzouki provided a percussive gust to the music’s rhythmic foundation.

There was little time in the hour-long broadcast for Gullane’s expert sense of balladry. The Standard on the Braes o’ Mar was the closest the Tannies got to settling down, but even its hard knuckled sense of history possessed the gallant swagger of a drinking song. Guess that just means the Tannies will have to knock on the door again soon. Next time, though, they need to stay the night.

kurt wagner of nashville's lambchop

Rounding out the bill was Kurt Wagner’s newest Nashville lineup of the indie pop collective Lambchop. While WoodSongs tends to frown on full bands, especially those with electric rhythm sections, Wagner’s six-man lineup maintained the same warm but whispery charm that engulfs the newest Lambchop album, OH (Ohio). Singing in a low, punctuated mumble that sounded like a cross between Mark Knopfler and Leonard Cohen (only happier) and dressed in an orange sweatshirt and cap that suggested he was late for the golf course, Wagner created very appealing, low-fi meditations that shifted from the bossa nova breeze of the new album’s title tune (a Buckeye bossa?) to the ethereal shuffle of Sharing a Gibson with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wagner proved an impenetrable lyricist at times. “This is my song, don’t sing along,” he quietly urged during the encore of National Talk Like a Pirate Day. But narrative definition and vocal clarity didn’t matter much last night.

Wagner’s deep warble was as indecipherable as Gullane’s foot-thick Scottish brogue. But within the music’s emotive charge (in the Tannies’ case) and glow (that would be Lambchop), the voices became part of warm orchestrations that communicated their respective moods quite exactly on the eve on an impending winter storm. What a wonderful, curious pair of acts to take a seat next to on a cold January night.