Pumpehuset, Copenhagen

I DON'T quite know why, and I haven't made a cement-solid ruling on this, but when it comes to literature and film, realism does it for me every time. A poetically expressed reality, sure (and one that belongs in quotation marks, since nothing is more relative than reality), but an expression that's also plain-speaking and plangent, dirty, direct, seen-through-a-glass-darkly, "serious", for want of a better word. Maybe I'm in need of an imagination transplant, but the rich stink of reality sets me reeling like nothing else. Who needs theatre when they have life?

Music, though... that's a different story. Sometimes, I guess, I just like to get away. I like to fly, or at least find the place where experience and expectation, emotion and intellect meet and make their differences meaningful. That's the place where Lamb lie down. And it's a wonderful place to be.

Tonight, Lamb are a transport of delight travelling at Mach 10, their feet barely touching the ground, a featherlight dream of tremulous desire and terrible dread that swells out in this corner of a frozen Copenhagen and thaws hundreds of hearts in seconds.

Trimmed down to a four-piece, they make explicit the logical progression of drum'n'bass from hip hop, coaxing out an apparently contradictory calmness from its addictive frenetic core and using it to ground fabulously dense tunes that embrace jazz. classical music and hip hop, rather than proclaiming it to be the new gospel. I'm not about to champion "organic" over "plastic", "natural" over "man-made", but it's plain to anyone with half an ear that Lamb's unique talent is to liquefy a rigid form, to make newly raw the overcooked, to warm the characteristically dry snap'n'crack of drum'n'bass over an emotional flame without resorting to the vapid warblings of a "soul diva" that made so much of "Timeless" and so many of its half-arsed followers tedious cobblers.

Louise Rhodes sings like an Arctic angel; her raspy sweet voice is two parts Sinead O'Connor, one part each Eartha Kitt and Billie Holiday, and conjures up the shimmer of sexual heat - all sunburned skin and night sweats - in "Lusty" as vividly as it does the tragic frostiness of ill communication in love gone wrong with "Feela". Her voice is impossibly affecting, her stage manner utterly unaffected; with her newly big hair scraped into a bun and Chinese brocade dress, Lou kidnaps every heart in the house.

It's not her show alone, though - Lamb are every bit the ensemble tonight; Andy Barlow is the hyperactive wunderkind larging it from behind his tower of gear who comes out to play a single tom on forthcoming single "Gorecki", a warm bloodrush of a song so devastatingly direct, so end-of-time perfect I'm almost blubbing in my beer. And he dabbles in a bit of "old skool drum'n'bass" with Jon for the encore, a new piece improv'd a few days ago in Brussels, where Lou sounds as dusky as Peggy Lee. There's the deliciously rubbery, subaquatic double bass that ripples through "God Bless" and sets spaces hanging in the air like storm clouds, the clunky, loping kool of "Transfatty Acid", the jittery calm of "Cotton wool" and the brand new "Ear Parcel", where trumpeter Kevin doesn't so much let rip the spirit of Miles Davis as set to it with a pair of sonic scissors.

Lamb are an exercise in effortlessly perfect emotional / intellectual balance, proof that there's more than one way to wave the flag for drum'n'bass and that love songs - for that's what makes their world turn - can do an awful lot more than make your toes curl.

C,mon, feel the poise.

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review:  Sharon O'Connell

nicked from 'Melody Maker', dated 22 February 1997

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