In which our hero of alt-country, the genius propagator of bitter sweet, fiercely-disciplined melodies of love and loss discovers the vocoder.

Kurt Wagner, leader of Nashville's Lambchop, is a kid in a sweet shop right now. After years of pared-back sound, he stands before us twiddling nobs, messing with lap tops as his voice echos, trebles, quadruples, multiple harmonises, feminises, around his always exquisite songs.

Last year's FLOTUS album, his 13th, took us all by surprise, a mumbling, meandering work of beauty in which Wagner filtered his voice through the aforementioned electronic software adding pulsing beats and repetitive Kraftwerkian grooves on 15 minute songs like a man reborn. Now at the De La Warr ("we were blown away" he deadpans of Bexhill as a Force 8 howls outside) he's not about to give up the new tricks.

Songs old and new get the treatment but don't drown the essential truth of Lambchop; that the songs are uniformly and delicately perfect. There is a small "but" of course. Wagner is the possessor of one of pop's most luxurious, evocative voices. He doesn't so much sing at you as bathe you in a honeyed, dreamy confection.

As such, then, there are times that the vocoder is truly gilding the lily, when you wish to hear the voice unadorned. So when nobs are occasionally untweaked, surprisingly, for example on the new album's auto-tuned epic The Hustle, here stripped back to brilliant essentials, and old favourite My Blue Wave, the results seem all the more affecting.

Wagner has an astonishingly rich back catalogue so he can afford to mix things up from show to show. Here there is virtually nothing from pop history's most brilliantly named double album (Aw C'mon/No You C'mon) and, more disappointingly, FLOTUS' true thoroughbred, In Search of 8675309, is left in the stable. But at their best Lambchop, with pianist Tony Crow (he of the terrible jokes) weaving twinkling melodies and bassist Matt Swanson playing (very) sparse notes to give foundation to Wagner's laments, are a delight.

One other small niggle. Seating, De La Warr? Why not let the audience stand, gather at the stage and maybe even bend a knee to the rhythm of Lambchop's wonderful world?