Lambchop: Punching the Clown Review: Spectral, Fascinatingly Ambiguous Shock of American History | Music

Thirty-two years after their debut album – and 26 years since Nixon, the magnificent country/soul creation that brought “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band” to a wider audience – Lambchop finds itself in a curious position. Its only permanent member, Kurt Wagner, has shown an admirable aversion to resting on his laurels. She followed Nixon with the austere Is a Woman and subsequently veered into electronica, smothering her voice with Auto-Tune and distortion. His latest album, 2022’s The Bible, threw in everything from house music to glitchy beats and ambient drift to accompany Wagner’s painful reflections on mortality and faith.

Throughout, Lambchop have maintained a remarkable level of quality control, meaning they ended up being slightly underrated or at least taken for granted. There has been no career-defining crossover hit, no unexpected viral hit, no foundation-shaking disaster followed by an attention-grabbing return to form; just a stream of really good albums and positive reviews. It’s the kind of consistent success that’s hard to maintain but easy to overlook in an attention-deficit economy.

So perhaps we should detect a certain sardonic note in the voice that unexpectedly interrupts Just West of Nicollet, the opening track of Lambchop’s seventeenth studio album. A rapper in carnival braggadocious mode appears midway and enthusiastically yells “LAMBCHOP NEW SHIT!” Then he disappears and is never heard from again. It couldn’t sound more out of place with the music, which, like the rest of Punching the Clown, strips Lambchop’s sound down to its essentials: acoustic guitar and banjo (the latter played by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon), the very occasional deployment of bass or piano, the faintest smear of electronics on Weakened. Wagner’s voice seems stripped of Auto-Tune, distortion and even reverb – it sounds like he’s singing directly in front of you.

It would be spartan if it weren’t for the choruses, provided by the London Choir and the Eau Claire Vocal Sextet, and inspired by Wagner’s encounter with lined singing, a form of hymn with roots in 17th-century Britain that is still used in some Southern Appalachian Baptist churches. You can trace the contours of its call-and-response structure in the way the title track and Cigar emerge from Wagner’s voice (worn, nicotine-stained, intimate) to stridency or choral exuberance, though there are moments, as on Afterburner, when the choruses also seem to evoke the lovely, warm harmonies of pre-World War II pop singles clearly arranged by the Mills Brothers or the Ink Spots.

An album this simple needs strong melodies, something that isn’t always present in Lambchop’s work, which can lean towards the spectral and atmospheric, but they are here in abundance. The rich swirl of harmonies at the center of Andrew Jackson Asshat is impressive; Stella boasts a melody that, in the best possible way, could have been written at any time in the last 100 years; The New World Wave beautifully juxtaposes Wagner’s murmured voice with a dreamy chorus performed by the choir. The letters are more difficult to button. Wagner tends to write obliquely, forcing the listener to latch on to strange, striking lines, like snippets of an overheard conversation, and that’s certainly the case here: a song with a title as strident as Andrew Jackson Asshat might be expected to worry Donald Trump, who has proven remarkably eager to compare himself to America’s controversial seventh president, but its subject matter is more implicit than explicit: cursory references to Jesus and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus suggest someone suffering posthumously in hell.

It’s not the only moment in which Punching the Clown feels informed by current events. White People borrows the chorus from Allan Toussaint’s late ’70s funk song Night People, changing a word and changing its mood from anxious to sinister, leaving it unclear whether the titular Caucasians “staring at each other, waiting for something to happen” are about to wreak havoc, fearful of the future or stunned into inaction. The last theme is echoed in Afterburner: “America silent… we’re so broke we can’t even pay attention / Oh my God.” Its references to the past seem equally ominous: Stella is filled with fragments of Wabash Cannonball, a popular song about a fictional train that carries away the dead; The New World Wave depicts a family, then adds “in 1929,” throwing them into the Great Depression.

It’s an album that draws the listener in with the warmth and intimacy of its sound, but ultimately leaves you uneasy. An intermittent but imperceptible sense of unease lingers long after Punching the Clown ends, and its unsettling quality is amplified by the fact that you can never be 100% sure what exactly Wagner is driving at. It’s strange and powerful, the kind of carefully balanced impact that clearly requires skill, developed over time, and time to develop is something that constant, unflashy success brings to an artist. Kurt Wagner seems to be more than okay with that.

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