LAMBCHOP - Punching The Clown

Kurt Wagner has always had a taste for sonic rarefaction, an expressive essentiality that has been particularly evident in many of Lambchop's live performances. It's no surprise, then, that on "Punching The Clown" he pares down the musical elements even further: guitar, bass, banjo and two gospel choirs directed by Blake Morgan (the London Choir and the Eau Claire Vocal Sextet).
There's no gimmick or creative strategy at play here: these twelve songs, forty-eight minutes of pure harmonic and lyrical enchantment, are inspired by Kurt Wagner's unexpected passion for Scottish Appalachian-tradition choral singing. The voice is the album's true protagonist, never so bare and direct (gone is the autotune used from "Flotus" to "The Bible"), to the point of floating in that space-time dimension typical of a small-club show, with the audience rapt in reverent silence.

Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) is the banjo master, called in by Wagner for a gorgeous, enveloping dialogue with the acoustic guitar. Add to that a few piano notes, the elegant stitching of the bass, and a brief electronic incursion on "Weakened", rounding out a stripped-down yet powerful sonic architecture.
"Punching The Clown" is another piece of Wagner's ever-precious, historically resonant exploration of American musical tradition and its anthropological undercurrents; Kurt Wagner continues to use the language of country music as a harpoon on which to anchor melodies and sonic intuitions decidedly untethered from any fixed sense of time.
Recorded in just three days at Justin Vernon's studio in Wisconsin, Lambchop's seventeenth album isn't merely the best of the last twenty years, but the most intense and accomplished since "Is A Woman". What gives "Punching The Clown" its charm isn't so much a return to origins as the total mastery of material so fragile and intimate it can seem bare and worn; all it takes is the line "Lambchop! No Shit", delivered by an unnamed rapper trying to crack the magic of the country-gospel choral setup on "Just West Of Nicollet", to rediscover that familiar, sharp-eyed irony.

The fact that Kurt Wagner has tackled this new challenge with genuine passion and a sense of responsibility is borne out by writing that's decidedly more learned and refined: anyone who's sampled the track that preceded the album's release ("Weakened") will have been swept up in a flood of emotions and almost cinematic suggestions. Each of the twelve tracks is really a story in itself: the plain beauty of the bare, sweeping melody of "Stella" and the world-weary intonation of an old, cynical troubadour on "The New World Wave" are chapters of that eternal human epic only the greatest writers, musicians and poets manage to capture in words, images and sound.
It's equally hard to remain unmoved by the solemn magic of "A Doctor In The House", a spine-tingling ballad where Greek choral tradition merges with gospel, while Kurt Wagner's baritone voice reaches dramatic intensity.

"Punching The Clown" is a record in which harmonic minimalism becomes pure magic: exemplary in this sense are the gorgeous "The New World Wave" and the brief, spiritual "To Do", a track that draws on lined-out singing, the a cappella style that is, ultimately, the album's driving force. The lyrics fall in step with this intense narrative style steeped in pagan mysticism; naturally there's no shortage of veiled political references – like the portrait of present-day America on "Afterburner" – and social ones – like the migrants' song on the bare, aching "Cigar" – further pieces of an enchanting record brimming with inspiration and passion.

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25/08/2026