Lambchop have released a ten-minute comedy short called Joke Country, built entirely around a fictional radio interview that goes wrong.
The casting is the joke. Steve Marsh plays the host, and Kurt Wagner, the band's frontman, is played by Henry Phillips rather than by himself. Wagner directed the film, so he is behind the camera watching someone else be him for ten minutes.
Phillips is not a random choice. He led the 2009 film Punching the Clown, which follows a comedian-musician making his way to Los Angeles, and which the band have named as an inspiration. Lambchop's new album is also called Punching the Clown, and the short arrived straight off its release.
Writing for Pitchfork on August 27, Jazz Monroe described the film as packing in a barrage of dry riffs, meta gags and pinwheeling semi-sequiturs, which is a fair description of a piece built on a bad interview rather than on a plot.
The band have been working this seam for a while. Lambchop's records have moved between country, soul and electronic treatments across three decades without ever settling into a genre, and a short film about a musician failing to explain himself to a radio host fits that history rather than sitting outside it. The indie and rock band's album shares the title, and both are now out.
The facts
- The short film is called Joke Country and runs ten minutes
- Kurt Wagner directed it
- Henry Phillips plays Wagner and Steve Marsh plays the radio host
- Phillips led the 2009 film Punching the Clown
- Lambchop's new album is also called Punching the Clown
- Jazz Monroe wrote about the short for Pitchfork on August 27
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