Nobody tells a story like Kurt Wagner, but then again, who would try to? In “The New World Wave,” a stunner from Lambchop’s new album Punching the Clown, the 66-year-old songwriter spins a generation-spanning yarn that touches on surviving the Great Depression, the patient assemblage of chosen family, and the way unattended dreams can crumble into sellable assets. It’s heavy stuff, but consider how he pulls it off: For a line or two, he gets hung up on a sticky metaphor about hot dogs; he tugs at the heartstrings with a blink-and-you-miss-it pun around the word “apparent”; just after, he breaks the fourth wall (“Wow, it just got moody”) and, thus, immediately kills the mood; approaching the climax alongside a choir, he grumbles the word “goddammit” so convincingly you’d think he forgot the tape was rolling. And who exactly is Easy Buckets, the character at the heart of the action? Well, maybe you just had to be there.
Even when it seems like he’s rambling, Wagner, like few working songwriters, has made an art of following his muse. Forty years into his career leading Lambchop, it’s easy to assume the sound of their records will always change: Are they the jumpiest alt-country band, the most soulful slowcore group, or a psychedelic lounge act? A chamber-folk collective with a horn section? Or a laptop-pop project with a guy muttering through Auto-Tune? Yes, all of the above. But as their sound has evolved and expanded, Wagner’s lyrics have remained omnivorous and uncontainable, quotable and profound but proudly unsentimental. “The New World Wave” may not tell a straight story, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t leave you hanging on every word.
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Part of its success is because, once again, Lambchop have reinvented themselves. On one hand, you can call it a return to form: They’re back to folk instruments, and, after several albums of electronic experimentation, no effects obscure Wagner’s vocals. Still, they’ve never sounded quite like this. Working with producer Ryan Olson at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin, Wagner is accompanied on each track by co-writer Andrew Broder on acoustic guitar and Vernon on banjo. The percussion is sparse and unconventional and fleeting: castanets in “Weakened”; what sounds like breaking glass to punctuate “The New World Wave.” Most notably, Wagner sings alongside the London Choir and the Eau Claires Vocal Sextet, who provide lined-out harmonies that give these songs the feelings of country-gospel hymnals, even when the lyrics involve words like “Dumbotron” and exclamations like “What the fuck?”
The effect is distinct in Lambchop’s catalog: intimate, uncanny, beautiful. The title track builds and swells around an autumnal guitar lick, while “Afterburner” tiptoes in with a trilling solo that suggests a gondola ride. Occasionally, Lambchop break the spell: A DJ drop declaring “LAMBCHOP, NEW SHIT” in the opening “Just West of Nicolett” marks their latest in a career of attention-grabbing introductions, and a rare echo effect in “Cigar” sends its closing moments into dubby territory. But for the most part, Punching the Clown suggests Wagner has spent the last few years searching for the right setting for these songs, only to discover it in their simplest, most intuitive forms. “To Do,” a heartfelt country song that doubles as a bucket-list lament, arrives with the bleak austerity of Rick Rubin-era Johnny Cash: “Before I get to heaven,” Wagner tells us, “I need to water the plants.”
