On any given night, the Best Band in the Country is playing, somewhere, and the only way you’d know it is if you were there. Still, there are a handful of acts that are if not sure things then pretty safe bets when it comes to live rock and roll, and long foremost among them has been Lucero. Certainly the group didn’t sell out the Metro Saturday night on the basis of hits and hype. For close to 15 years now, Lucero’s been a band that’s thrived on its reputation, a grassroots imprimatur that’s about as close to a guarantee as it gets.
That hasn’t stopped the group from tweaking what is at heart (and it has a lot of heart) simple music, songs about drinking and hellraising, losing girls and getting tattoos. Saturday the group showed off one of its more recent additions, a two-man horn section, which further swelled the former four-piece up to an impressive eight members and helped reinforce the soulfulness that always lingered just on the periphery of the Memphis band’s countrified-punk (or punkified-country, take your pick). On the group’s eighth album “Women & Work,” southern soul (a la Stax) further takes the spotlight, and predictably a lot of Lucero’s new songs, such as “On My Way Downtown” and the title track, with their brassy arrangements and extra breathing room, stood out this evening.
Admittedly, as a group that doesn’t work with a setlist Lucero sometimes struggled to find the right balance of what raspy singer/guitarist Ben Nichols called his slow, sad songs and the band’s more raucous material. As impressed as he was by the rowdy crowd’s patience as Lucero swung between those two poles, from the likes of the WWII chronicle “The War” or Mom” to the propulsive sing-alongs “Sound of the City” and “Tears Don’t Matter Much,” the show never quite achieved the tight, anything-goes heights that Lucero is known for. Not that the nuance of such a high standard meant much to the reveling crowd, which enthusiastically embraced the useful adage Nichols quoted early on: “The drunker you are, the better it sounds.”