Lambchop - Punching The Clown (Black Vinyl)

Lambchop - Punching The Clown (Black Vinyl)

Available to pre-order now, released August 21st. As this is an import we may have stock a week later.

Please note : If you pre-order an item and add more items in stock, we will ship the order together when the pre-order arrives. Release dates are subject to change, we don't send out emails, any changes are updated on the website.

To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, Punching the Clown began as a ghost hunt. After hearing a song on the radio while driving one night — “a minimal single chord strummed banjo and a small group of voices” — he went looking for it and failed. In his pursuit, he discovered “lined out singing,” a form of acapella call-and-response gospel singing that began in Scotland in the 1800s and became a root of American gospel and country music when Scottish immigrants settled in Appalachia. The song, typically a hymn, is led by a clerk, who begins the verse alone before a choir swells up to accompany them on the rest of the line.

Lined out singing was born out of necessity — not every member of a given congregation could read, so the clerk’s voice spurred the choir’s memory of what came next in the hymn — but its effect is profound: a haunting, elegiac means of interpretation in which you can hear not only the words and what they mean, but what those words meant to each person singing them.

Tracklisting:

1. Just West Of Nicollet
2. A Doctor In The House
3. Weakened
4. Stella
5. Punching The Clown
6. White People
7. The New World Wave
8. Andrew Jackson Asshat
9. Afterburner
10. Cigar
11. To Do
12. No Chicago