Lambchop: Punching the Clown review – spectral, spellbindingly ambiguous stirring of US history | Music

Thirty-two years on from their debut album – and 26 from Nixon, the gorgeous country/soul confection that brought “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band” to a wider audience – Lambchop find themselves in a curious position. Their sole continuous member Kurt Wagner has displayed an admirable disinclination to rest on his laurels. He followed up Nixon with the austere, piano-driven Is a Woman and subsequently diverted into electronics, smothered his voice in Auto-Tune and distortion. Their last album, 2022’s The Bible, threw up everything from house music to glitchy rhythms to ambient drift to accompany Wagner’s pained ruminations on mortality and faith.

Throughout, Lambchop have kept up a remarkable level of quality control that’s meant they’ve ended up being slightly underrated or at least taken for granted. There’s been no career-defining crossover hit, no unexpected viral success, 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 steady success that’s hard to maintain but easy to overlook in an attention-deficit economy.

So perhaps we should detect a certain sardonic note to the voice that unexpectedly disrupts Just West of Nicollet, the opening track of Lambchop’s 17th studio album. A rapper in braggadocious fairground-barker mode appears midway through, excitedly bellows “LAMBCHOP NEW SHIT!” then vanishes, never to be heard from again. It couldn’t sound more out of place with the music, which, like the rest of Punching the Clown, pares back Lambchop’s sound to bare 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 appears stripped of Auto-Tune, distortion, even reverb: he sounds as if he’s singing directly in front of you.

It would be spartan were it not for the backing vocals, provided by the London Choir and the Eau Claire Vocal Sextet, and inspired by Wagner encountering lined-out singing, a form of hymnody with roots in 17th century Britainthat’s still used in some southern Appalachian Baptist churches. You can trace the outline of its call-and-response structure in the way the title track and Cigar surge from Wagner’s voice – weathered, nicotine-stained, intimate – to choral stridency or lushness, although there are moments, as on Afterburner, when the backing vocals also seem to evoke the lovely, warm harmonies of starkly arranged pre-second world war pop singles by the Mills Brothers or the Ink Spots.

An album this unvarnished needs strong tunes – not always a given with Lambchop’s work, which can lean into the spectral and the atmospheric, but they’re here in abundance. The rich swirl of harmonies at the centre of Andrew Jackson Asshat is breathtaking; Stella boasts a melody that, in the best possible way, could have been written at any point in the last 100 years; The New World Wave beautifully juxtaposes Wagner’s muttered vocal with a dreamy chorus carried by the choir. The lyrics are harder to button. Wagner tends to write obliquely, forcing the listener to latch on to odd, striking lines, like snatches of overheard conversation, and that’s certainly the case here: you might expect a song as stridently titled as Andrew Jackson Asshat to concern Donald Trump, who’s proved remarkably eager to compare himself to America’s controversial seventh president, but its subject is more implied than explicit: glancing references to Jesus and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus suggest someone posthumously suffering in hell.

It’s not the only moment where Punching the Clown feels informed by current events. White People borrows the chorus of Allan Toussaint’s late-70s funk track Night People, changes one word, and shifts its mood from eager to ominous, leaving it unclear as to whether the titular Caucasians “looking at each other, waiting for something to happen” are about to cause havoc, fearful about the future or stunned into inaction. The latter theme recurs in Afterburner: “America on mute … we’re so broke we can’t even pay attention / My God.” Its references to the past seem similarly ill-omened: Stella is studded with fragments of Wabash Cannonball, a folk song about a fictional train that carries the dead away; The New World Wave depicts a family, then adds “in 1929”, pitching them into the Great Depression.

It’s an album that lures the listener in with the warmth and intimacy of its sound, but ultimately leaves you unsettled. An intermittent but unignorable sense of disquiet hangs around long after Punching the Clown is over, its haunting quality amplified by the fact that you can never be 100% certain exactly what 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 one thing that steady, unflashy success affords an artist. Kurt Wagner seems to be more than fine with that.

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