Punching the Clown: a hymn book with jokes in the margins

Punching the Clown began as a ghost hunt. Kurt Wagner heard a song on his car radio one night, banjo and a small knot of voices, and never found it again. What he found instead was lined-out singing, a call-and-response gospel form that traveled from Scotland into Appalachian churches, where a leader starts the line alone and the room swells in behind. Lambchop’s seventeenth album is his answer to a song that may not exist.

The construction is fast and communal. Three days at April Base, Justin Vernon’s Wisconsin studio, with Ryan Olson producing, Vernon himself on banjo and a six-voice choir shadowing Wagner through songs he built with Andrew Broder. For a band three decades deep, that is a new shape: whispered country verses that keep getting answered, hymn logic applied to Wagner’s usual small American scenes.

“Just West of Nicollet” is the loveliest opener they have cut in a decade, banjo percolating under the talk-sing while the choir arrives like light through a doorway. “Andrew Jackson Asshat” keeps the band’s oldest tradition alive: the most beautiful songs get the worst titles. “Afterburner” earns its late slot.

The choir mostly earns its place. On “White People” the device lands squarely on the nose, sarcasm where the record wants grace, and across twelve songs the swell-and-answer trick starts showing its seams. Ten tracks would have been a tighter sermon.

Seventeen albums in, Wagner still finds unopened rooms in his own house. This one is small, wooden and full of voices. Whispered country from a band with nothing to prove, chasing something anyway.

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