I can’t remember the last time I connected with an album the way I have with Lambchop’s Punching the Clown—the last time an album has gone almost instantly, within three or four plays, from object of curiosity to something more like a ritual ablution, and then retained that sanctified air, assuaging some deep and unnameable need, for days on end.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve kept coming back to a record like I have this one, as though in search of answers. And not even really found them, maybe, but found something else—something like an assurance of companionship, a promise of revelation, a new way of asking the essential questions. (In this, Punching the Clown is a lot like Bill Callahan’s best work.)
I have listened to it so many times over the past six days.
I have listened on the airplane, on the final leg of a two-day journey from Menorca to Portland, bleary eyed and nerves jangling, wondering what the hell I was coming back to.
I have listened in my hotel room—well, not really a hotel, but a guest room that my mom’s assisted-living facility rents out to family members—while fighting off jet lag and looming dread.
I have listened in my mom’s apartment, boxing up her things, setting aside a few essentials to accompany her to her new home, and bagging the rest for Goodwill, or the junk haulers.
I have listened at length, over and over again, in my rental car, first making trips to the rehab facility where she spent the last couple of weeks, and now to her new group home, where she will presumably—if we’re lucky, I suppose—spend the rest of her days, whether that’s six months or six years, along with four other confused and broken old people.
I have listened while walking the trails near her assisted-living community, the one she’s leaving—the same trails I walked daily with my wife and daughter just this past July when we were here to visit, munching on wild blackberries and plums and yellow cherries, and I have missed my family terribly. Summer’s waning, the fruit is mostly gone, and it’s hard not to regard that otherwise banal fact as the most glaringly obvious metaphor ever. (Cue a line from Lambchop’s “The New World Wave”: “Wow, it just got moody.”)
My second night in town, I listened to Punching the Clown after taking a 10mg gummy and it felt like a quasi-religious experience. The high itself was intermittently unpleasant; I was too anxious, too deep in my head, powerless before the onslaught of intrusive thoughts. But the physical embrace of the music was blissful, sublime, like being suspended in water, immersed in liquid voices.
Those voices, of course, are a big part of what makes Punching the Clown so singular. On virtually every song, Kurt Wagner is backed by a swelling choir—two of them, actually: the London Choir and the Eau Claire Vocal Sextet—singing in what Sam Sodomsky, in his excellent Pitchfork review, identified as a Southern tradition, imported from Scotland, known as “lined-out” harmony singing. Their singing, so sweet and so true, makes quite the contrast with Wagner’s own haggard signature drawl, with its distinctive lilt and cracking edges. His voice brings to mind humble weeds lining a dirt road; theirs is a flying saucer hovering over green fields: rounded, buoyant, luminous.
There are times when the backing choir reminds me of certain country records from the 1960s, like Johnny Cash’s Hymns From the Heart, where the choir lent highfalutin’ panache. (I’m thinking in particular of the unison parts on “The New World Wave,” with their generous natural reverb.) It’s an anachronistic effect; I can’t recall hearing anything quite like it in the past few decades of indie or alt or experimental rock or country.
But as reverent as Lambchop’s hired guns can sound, voices rising to the heavens, Wagner and producer Ryan Olson never use them in obvious ways. Sometimes, they transmit the exact opposite of gravitas—like in the title track, when Wagner sings, “I’m trying not to sound like I’m punching the clown” (slang, Sodomsky reveals, for masturbation), and then a muttered aside, “What the what?” and the choir joins in with a billowing, extended “What… the… fuck,” collapsing the sacred into the profane with such grace that you can’t help but laugh.
I don’t actually know what most of these songs are about. At best, I get fragments.
The album is shot through with ominous thoughts about America’s sad, ignominious demise: the “Fight! Fight! Fight!” reference at the end of “A Doctor in the House”; the paean to migrant workers in “Cigar”; the meme-like language of decline in “Afterburner” (“We’re so broke/We can’t even pay attention/My god/My god”). And, more than anything, the seething, unfocused rage of “White People,” featuring the most terrifying vocal performance I’ve ever heard from Wagner.
And call it confirmation bias, but I can feel the specter of death waiting in the wings (“It’s over in a minute/Is this some kind of test?”). Even a gentle, unburdened song like “Stella” smuggles intimations of mortality among its many possible interpretations; I can’t hear its softly murmured unison refrain (“Roll me over, roll me right and let ’em in”) without thinking of bodies and the loved ones who come to pay their respects.
“Weakened” depicts an ailing man in bed, and while my mom’s dementia—which, much worsened following a recent surgery and three-week dose of antibiotics, might more aptly be described as full-on amnesia—surely colors my interpretation, I think lines like these are among the album’s most straightforward: “Then he fell sick…/Things had gotten peculiar/The grainy underwater/Singing sounds in his head.”
(I don’t really know Lambchop’s last album, 2022’s The Bible, but a reference to it in Sodomsky’s review leapt out at me: “Wagner described the emotional toll of tending to his ailing, elderly father: ‘It should get easier with time,’ he cried, sensing that just the opposite was true.”)
But—again, like Callahan at his best—there’s really no telling what these songs are about, because they are about so many things, contain so many dimensions, admit so many valences and voices. They are unruly and wild, jostling with half-submerged meanings. In one moment, Wagner is wrapping the sweetest, most romantic couplets around an image that I just can’t compute (“Like a Kool-Aid smile in a scallop shell/We’re cracking up in the kitchen/I’m overweight and you’re overwhelmed/But it’s good”). The next, he and his choir are simply reeling off names off the map, rendering them as emotionally as the album’s most direct lines. That the song in question, “No Chicago,” closes out the whole album only makes its cryptic resistance to interpretation feel that much more tricksterish. This is not an album where you glean the meaning from the lyric sheet; you inhabit the songs, feel them resonating through you like white blood cells.
Of course, there’s something inherently reassuring about the almost exclusively acoustic palette of Andrew Broder’s guitar and Justin Vernon’s banjo, which provide practically the only accompaniment, save those billowing cumulus choirs. But unlike, say, Iron & Wine’s “Sodom, South Georgia” (a song I once wept to, face pressed against an airplane window, the previous night’s MDMA still in my system, mere months after my dad passed away, in 2005) the effect is never maudlin or sentimentalist or twee; just as its name promises, Punching the Clown is strange and mischievous and filled with impish asides. The very first song is interrupted by a completely incongruous DJ drop: “Lambchop, new shit!” that slices sideways through the track like a beam from an alien dimension.
The spirit of the album lives in those temporary slippages. The trilling dub effect punctuating Wagner’s observation, “Things had gotten peculiar,” and the fried circuit-board crackle accompanying “Watched the barren cracks/formed in the ceiling.” The way the choir sloshes like an uneasy sea in “Weakened,” as though Olson’s hand were dragging against the tape reel.
It goes the other way, too. Against a backdrop of weeds and potholes, some of the most striking moments are the simplest. The guitar playing in the bridge of “Stella” is some of the most breathtakingly elegant music I’ve heard all year, a Jacob’s ladder of cascading chords that surprises even after dozens of listens. There’s a trap door to infinity hidden in those 13 seconds of fingerpicking.
Along with “Stella,” “The New World Wave” is probably my favorite song on the album, even though it’s also the one that I understand least. (A side note: One of the things that makes Punching the Clown so eminently loopable is its careful pacing, its internal patterns of tension and release, so that even your least favorite songs feel just as integral to the whole experience.) It’s a multi-generational tale that begins, I think, with his grandparents, back in 1929. But every time I think I’m close to puzzling out its tangled family tree, he switches things up—“Not putting the hot dog in the bun for me/And there’s one thing’s gonna slow me down/Our sleeves drag through the mustard/Doing the new world wave”—and soon we’ve gone offworld entirely, the choirs perkily announcing, “We’re on another planet,” like some strange combination of Greek chorus and 1960s holiday TV special. The tether gets slippery, but it’s there: “Oh goddamnit/I’m reaching out to you,” he sings, and I believe him.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this. But I’m trying to figure out why this record has affected me so deeply. It’s not just that the circumstances of a difficult period in my life make music feel more vivid—over the past six days, I’ve tried listening to other music, things I love, and I could barely stand them. They felt irrelevant, pointless, juvenile.
But Lambchop’s album somehow captures a feeling of grief that I can’t even name. Maybe that has to do with its very ambiguity, that Wagner can make something so beautiful—and so darkly funny—out of hints and fragments and misdirection.
There’s a line I keep coming back to in the title track, when he pleads that he be shown how to love, and the choir answers, “And we will not stumble,” every syllable floating skyward like a silvery weather balloon. Sometimes maybe you just need to hear an expression of faith; sometimes maybe you just need to feel held, like a big ol’ baby.
Whatever’s going on in my mother’s life, and my life, at the moment, it will change, and it will pass. There may be worse in store; hopefully there is also better. But these days I have spent with Punching the Clown will stay with me. Sometimes an album finds you exactly when you need it most.
Paid subscriptions are $5 a month or $50 a year; perks include exclusive playlists (now available on Tidal as well as Apple Music, Deezer, and Spotify); Eavesdropping, an occasional series of mixes by me; the ongoing Mixes Digest series; and full access to the archives, including interviews with Topdown Dialectic, Bill Orcutt, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Call Super, Avalon Emerson, Nick León, and more.
One of the best music reviews i've read in quite a while, while i listened to this a week or so ago your tender, poignant and personal observations added a whole layer of feeling as i listened to it again this morning. Thank you.
Beautiful piece of writing that finally got me to pull my finger out and subscribe. Also, it's a fantastic record, Kurt's best in years.