* PREORDER * LAMBCHOP - Punching The Clown LP

* PREORDER * expected to arrive for 21st Aug release

Also available on CD (preorder recommended)

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.