Enzo Favata: Ritornare & Lambchop: Punching The Clown

Ein tänzerisches, folkloristisch befeuertes Jazzalbum aus der Abteilung der Luftkünste, bei denen feinste Empfindungen umeinanderwirbeln! Aus einem reichen Fundus schöpft das transatlanstische Quintett um den 70-jährigen sardischen Saxofonisten Enzo Favatas allemal, vom Nino Rota bis Dino Saluzzi. Der Horizont ist unablässig weit gespannt: tänzerische Anmut und die Klangfarbe Blau, Glückstaumel und entdeckungsfreudige Nostalgie! Kaum scheint eine melodische Linie klar umrissen, löst sie sich an ihren Rändern wieder auf, um unverhofft wieder aufzutauchen. Wehe, einer nennt dies „easy listening“ statt „deep easy listening“! (M.E.)

Lambchop is a group (practically an institution) that has haunted the outer dark of Nashville, TN, since it started life as Posterchild in 1986. Both a band and a moniker, Lambchop’s tangled nest of shifting personnel and hinted-at musical styles belongs to one Kurt Wagner, whose picture on the band’s website calls to mind the faintly touched snake-oil salesman of bygone America. For forty years, Wagner has fronted this band through early recordings, its identity change from Posterchild, and the regular release of albums (starting in 1994), resulting in what is now a towering and well-regarded discography.

Punching the Clown is Lambchop’s new record after a four-year silence, and it finds Wagner taking a renewed approach to songwriting based on an obscure source, resulting in an album that seems designed to test the listener’s patience. Not that that’s a bad thing.

The seed that became Punching the Clown was planted when, on his way to get gas, Wagner heard a one-chord song sung by a small group of voices over a banjo. Who was the artist? Wagner never discovered that, but in the process of searching, he found an old type of acapella singing called lined-out singing, which probably began in Scotland and ended up in Appalachia, becoming a kind of headwater of bluegrass and country. 

Captivated, Wagner set out to make an album emulating it. As such, Punching the Clown can be seen, at least in part, as a magnificent failure. Nothing on this record really sounds like lined-out singing. But it does have a peculiar quality of muted instrumentation (mostly banjo and guitar) and a chorus of voices that create an incredible, sometimes breathtaking dynamic and harmonic contrast to Wagner’s indolent singing (or muttering, as the case may be).

The album’s opener, “Just West of Nicollet,” starts with a simple banjo melody, with acoustic guitar beneath and voices that quietly haunt the changes. By the time you get to the end of the record, you’ve heard a vocal sextet (augmented at times by a choir recorded in London) perform pretty much the full range of what a group of voices can do. From bass to soprano, from quietly sketching chords to great swelling rapturous movements, and from echoing Wagner as individuals to echoing him as a group, Punching the Clown brings the human voice to modern recording in a way that hasn’t been heard in decades. The eccentric electronic flourishes here and there only serve to magnify just how beautiful these arrangements are.

And if that is all you get from this record, that the human voice is a remarkable instrument, then it’s worth whatever you had to pay for it. But in addition, there’s Wagner. “I’m a human calculator, and I never make mistakes,” he sings in the opening lines. “And I’ve been smoking like a Russian cosmonaut.” Odd lyrical content for an album ostensibly steeped in Americana source material.

Listening to Wagner means taking a journey so deep into absurdity that, at times, it makes sense. One can’t miss the zeitgeist in the opening lines of the eerie “A Doctor in the House.” After a vocal introduction that sounds like someone mimicking a muted trombone, Wagner sings, “In the yard there was a punching bag/ That everyone felt the need to hit/ I guess it’s just a matter of common sense/ But I think it’s getting time for them to quit.”

At other times, it’s just odd. On “New World Wave,” Wagner sings apropos of nothing, “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.” On the title track, Wagner sings, “I’m not trying to sound like I’m punching the clown” (even though, in some ways, that’s exactly what he’s been doing), then mutters, “Wait, what the what, what the fuck,” and the vocal group swoops in behind him, swelling to glorious, harmonized majesty singing, “What the fuck!”

The first couple of times you listen to Punching the Clown, all you hear is how weird and sedate it is. But the more you listen, the more you realize Wagner and company are not acquiescing to your demands of what a record should sound like. You are submitting to theirs. Above all other things on this record, Lambchop demands that you hear humans singing. Focus on that, and you’ll discover the possibilities of expression are limitless.

Andrew Riley, glide magazine