ROUTES & BRANCHES
featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
August 25, 2026
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
The heck with this week. Has anyone taken a look at NEXT week's release calendar?! New full lengths on the way from (deep breath) Alabama Shakes, Dogwood Tales, Fruition, Jayhawks, Mama's Broke, Riley Downing, Son Volt and more! We'd be happy and justified in writing about any one of those. And that's just the stuff we know about, not to mention any unexpected surprises.
Okay, so this week we gave some consideration to new projects from Brennan Wedl, Squirrel Flower, and Wild Pink, before deciding that our time would be best spent on Lambchop.
A couple years ago we visited a nearby record store for the first time. Just for the sake of orientation, we asked if they had anything from Lambchop. The person at the counter responded, You mean the little puppet? No. No sir, we do not mean the little puppet.
Lambchop deserves better. Kurt Wagner has spent more than thirty years challenging our expectations of qualities such as beauty, normalcy, roots, and outsider. Early projects found Lambchop lumped in with the mid-90s alt.country bin, at best an exceptionally loose assessment. Increasingly, Wagner was experimenting with folk, soul, and studio manipulation, cloaking his typically simple songs with beats and interesting digital backdrops. Even if albums weren't always entirely successful, nobody could accuse Lambchop of being dull.
After so many years fiddling in the studio, Punching the Clown arrives as the most refreshingly normal project Kurt Wagner and company have undertaken in recent memory. Which might mean it's actually the most unexpected. The premise of Punching pairs acoustic songs with choral lined-out singing courtesy of the Eau Claire Vocal Sextet. Arranged by Blake Morgan, while these harmonies are rooted in worship, they largely serve a textural purpose here, like a subtle breeze of voices following Wagner's lead.
From the man himself: In early 2024 I heard a song on the radio on my way to get some gas. Just a minimal single chord strummed banjo and a small group of voices. It seemed perfect in the moment as the moment became perfect in itself ... I wanted to make a record that emulated this kind of music.
Throughout Lambchop's oeuvre, Kurt Wagner's basic songs have remained consistent, wry and eliptical lyrics delivered in his unsteady, dry-as-leaves drawl. On the album's opener, "Just West Of Nicollet", he sings Let the windows stay open / In the wild Mid West / There's things in Minnesota / It's the wildest place that I've found yet. Accompanied by Justin Vernon's banjo and Andrew Broder's guitar, the choral waves rise and fall, wax and wane, cresting briefly only towards the song's close. "Weakened" adds minor studio burbles and manipulation, with Wagner possibly narrating the proceedings: Things had gotten peculiar / The grainy underwater / Singing sounds in his head.
Punching the Clown doesn't plop us in the pews by any means. This isn't The Gospel According To Lambchop. On the title cut, the chorale answers Wagner's I'm trying not to sound like I'm punching the clown with their own Wait, what the fuck. Nevertheless, there is a curious juxtaposition between the formality of the vocal arrangements and the folky informality of Lambchop's acoustic songs. The pairing is most mutually complimentary on "New World Wave" or "Cigar", pieces that invest the choir with a more active role: I'll meet you at Benton Chapel / Let it all go down / To the holy town / And share a lot of singing.
While the addition of the Vocal Sextet sets the plot for the project, the theme lies more with Kurt Wagner's voice and Vernon's banjo. For those of us who have followed Lambchop for years across new settings and experiments, Punching the Clown is actually a breath of fresh air, allowing us access once again to Wagner straight, no (or little) chaser. Once again, we're left with the recurring questions of beauty and normalcy. The line-singing is beautiful at times, and we wouldn't be listening if there wasn't a base attraction to Lambchop's outsider folk. Time will no doubt see the collaborators following a new distraction (and we'll be there for it). For today, we're willing to brand Punching the Clown among Lambchop's more successful dalliances, a quietly engaging push-and-pull between minimalism and something more. Like a Kool-Aid smile in a scallop shell / We're cracking up in the kitchen / I'm overweight, you're overwhelmed / But it's good ...
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