Last year, much-loved Nashville indie institution Lambchop found yet another way to subvert expectations. At the heart of their album Showtunes is Kurt Wagner playing piano by remote, so to speak. He’s a guitarist who doesn’t know how to play piano, but he used software to turn audio recordings of his guitar into MIDI information that triggers realistic piano sounds. There’s another new twist on the horizon in the Lambchop universe. Wagner has announced a new LP called The Bible, set for release Sept. 30. He once again collaborated with Poliça’s Ryan Olson and Fog’s Andrew Broder, who worked remotely on Showtunes. This time, Wagner traveled to Minneapolis to work with them in person on what would become The Bible.
The announcement comes along with a music video for the debut single, the moody and groovy “Police Dog Blues.” As Wagner explains in a release, the protests in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 inspired him take another listen to a blues song cut nearly a century ago by ragtime-inspired singer-guitarist Blind Blake, also called “Police Dog Blues.”
“Of note, it was originally recorded in 1929, the year my father was born, and it seems John Peel played it on his show on Sept. 11, 1968,” Wagner writes. “It was deceptively upbeat musically and not what I remembered at all. Then I remembered a police dog is a Shepherd.”
The computer-animated music video, which reminds me a little of the zombie-apocalypse video game series The Last of Us, stars a pack of German Shepherds who have survived after the human race policed itself into extinction. As director Isaac Gale notes in the release: “White privilege and apathy in the face of disastrous reality. I don’t think it’s stretching it to compare the police in Minneapolis — where myself and the producers of the record, Ryan Olson and Andrew Broder, all live — to a human-made catastrophic disaster.”
Check it out above, and preorder the album at your favorite record store or via this handy link, where you can also find the single on streaming services. For the vinyl-heads, note that you can preorder the two-LP set (with an etching on one side) in yellow-and-black marble or standard black, and two particular indie stores, Minneapolis’ Electric Fetus and Nashville’s own Grimey’s, will have the record on gray-and-white marbled vinyl, an exclusive color dubbed “smog.”
