Lambchop: Punching The Clown album review – Choral folk-country calm
Lambchop’s newest project fuses spiritual choral singing, subtle instrumentation and lyrical stillness
In his terminally understated way, Lambchop mainman Kurt Wagner has been going great guns in recent years, swapping guitar for piano on Showtunes ‘for people who don’t like show tunes’, offering lamentations on The Bible, and now turning to the Outer Hebrides for inspiration on his latest album. Punching The Clown draws on the Lewis psalm-singing tradition where lines are called by a precentor and echoed by the congregation in austere but mesmerising fashion. Over in Lambchop world, Wagner’s distinctive clipped baritone is complemented by a transatlantic choral ensemble led by Blake Morgan. This is no a cappella devotional but what instrumentation there is only adds to the musical balm, with Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon leading the way on banjo, providing that Appalachian connection.
Lyrics are impressionistic, sometimes downright oblique, but Wagner paints a front porch picture on ‘A Doctor In The House’, soundtracked by robust vocals in the East European male voice choral tradition. The dramatic flourishes on ‘White People’ sound almost monastic, while voices eddy like prairie wind on ‘Weakened’, a comforting country folk ode for a soul in need of healing. ‘To Do’ is a particularly hymnal sounding bucket list, ‘No Chicago’ a calming inventory of various cities around the northern hemisphere, arranged as a sacred incantation. But elsewhere Wagner pulls back further, offering a bare folk lament for the migrant worker on ‘Cigar’ and a snapshot of hard times in the Great Depression on ‘The New World Wave’, soothed with an exquisite overlapping choral call.
Punching The Clown is released by City Slang on Friday 21 August; Picture: Graham Tolbert.