Lambchop Makes Simplicity Sound Holy
Since forming in the early-90s in Nashville, Lambchop has followed no one’s playbook but their own. They make slow and gorgeous albums with track names like “Impossible Meatballs” and “My Face Your Ass.” They once chose an 18-minute IDM makeover of “The Hustle” as a lead single. And they’ve never made the same album twice.
For nearly 40 years, founder and bandleader Kurt Wagner has paired his warbling southern drawl over music that’s generally anything but country.
Soul. Funk. Classical. Ambient electronica – that’s only a handful of the genres Wagner and his many collaborators have used to reinvent Lambchop over and over throughout the years.
My grandpa, who hails from Tennessee just like Wagner, would call that being “ornery,” a country word for stubborn. At 66, Wagner’s only grown more delightfully ornery by steering Lambchop deeper and deeper into uncharted waters. Where 2016’s bold electronic reinvention FLOTUS felt like an exciting hard reset with limitless possibilities, the fractured experimental turns in 2021’s Showtunes and 2022’s The Bible felt distant and cold.
That’s what makes their 17th album, Punching the Clown, such a surprise: this is the warmest version of Lambchop in well over a decade. After probing the outer reaches for answers, Wagner has regrounded his longstanding project in music that’s earthy and, to a degree, simple.
Lambchop recorded the album over the course of three days at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio. Despite the fact that he’s credited on nearly every song, the Bon Iver leader is just a background player here – I’ve only been able to pick out his unmistakable voice in the closer “No Chicago.”
Where previous iterations of Lambchop could include over 20 different musicians, the songs on Punching the Clown feature a much tighter list of players: mostly just Wagner, Andrew Broder on guitar, and Vernon on banjo. Vocally, Wagner is backed up by two choirs – the Eau Claire Vocal Sextet and London Choir – that give this album its distinct identity.
According to press materials, the idea for Punching the Clown came after Wagner heard a song on the radio that featured in-line singing, a vocal tradition first introduced in 1800s Scotland that later took root in Appalachian folk music and gospel. In this style, one vocalist (traditionally a priest) leads a choir that repeats the lines in harmony.
What results are songs that can start with the intimacy of a campfire round and suddenly expand into cathedral-sized grandeur. Late album highlight “To Do,” where Wagner contemplates a modest bucket list, sounds like a lost hymnal thanks to the choir’s humming presence.
That trick could lose its power if overused, so Wagner and producer Ryan Olson find unique ways to layer in the choir that are custom to each song.
“New World Wave” is skeletal until the choir shows up at the midpoint to sing the title phrase with one of the album’s best and warmest melodies. They start “White People” with a jumpscare that sets an appropriate tone for the song’s scathing condemnation of political malaise.
One of my favorite moments happens in the title track, when Wagner leads the choir in a heavenly “what the fuck?” That moment highlights one aspect of Lambchop I’ve always loved: irreverence wrapped in grandiose balladry. Wagner’s got a poison-pointed wit and a deadly sense of timing that helps give his sometimes shaggy albums a welcome jolt.
His pen is sharp as ever here. In “A Doctor in the House,” he uses that common expression to point out that even trusted fixers and healers must need a check-up, given just how sick the rest of the world is. As a songwriter, he knows the cure isn’t his responsibility:
“I’m not really a doctor/I’m more of a dentist or a shrink
If something’s bothering you, don’t look at me
Cause I’m just sittin’ in the exit row”
Wagner has always written songs that reckon with the way beauty and depravity run parallel in life – why separate them when, together, they form the truth?
Like so many of the best Lambchop albums, songs of bitter frustration and contempt sit alongside heart-wrenching ballads. Lead single “Weakened” belongs in the same conversation as Lambchop classics like “Up With People,” “The Gettysburg Address,” and “Gone Tomorrow.” The way the choir wraps and lifts up Wagner’s trembling vocals is absolutely soul-stirring.
Its neighbor in the tracklist, “Stella,” is another stunner, with Broder’s gentle guitar leading the song as Wagner and his choir contemplate what’s actually lost in death. “We’ll never be together any more, or any less,” Wagner promises. “It’s time to stop, just hold my hand.”
In a career of near constant left turns, the most unexpected thing Wagner could’ve done was return to a rootsy sound that Lambchop seemed to outgrow long ago. The result is a homecoming that yields one of his richest collections of songs in years.
By Reed Strength
