Lambchop return with new material and an approach marked by simplicity and spiritual folk roots. The Nashville band has recorded their next album, ‘Punching the Clown’, with production by Ryan Olson and the collaboration of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), who provides banjo on several songs.
The first preview, ‘Weakened’, stands out for its choral atmosphere, with a group of six voices evoking the first recorded music. Several dates have been confirmed in Europe, although none in Spain.
The album has been recorded at Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin. Kurt Wagner, leader of the band, has commented that the album is built from the reduction of elements, to the point that the percussion is practically limited to some nice castanets.
Wagner has said that the project was born from a very specific inspiration: a song he heard by chance on the radio, based on a single banjo chord and a simple chorus. From there he became interested in “lined out singing”, a tradition of choral singing that emerged in Scotland and later adopted in Appalachia, based on call and response.
That music revealed to Wagner “the raw beauty and power of the human voice with its unique varieties, its unadorned simplicity giving weight to the words as they were sung.” “I wanted to make an album that emulated this type of music,” he adds.
