One Of Us

Interstate jammers LaMP return with their second studio collection — One Of Us. Featuring Vermont-based Russ Lawton (drums) and Ray Paczkowski (Hammond organ, Hohner Clavinet, Wurlitzer electric piano), alongside Brooklynite Scott Metzger (guitar), the group distills singular, road-honed improv instincts into taut, instrumental epics.

One Of Us, which consists of 10 tracks packed into 35-minutes of kaleidoscopic interplay and club-shifting grooves, is the band’s first studio outing since their self-titled debut, released during 2020, and follow’s last year’s double-dose Live At Nectar’s, which was sourced from two nights at the storied Burlington, VT institution where the band was born.

“If there is a theme to this record, it might be ‘three of us,’” Paczkowski says. “We’re all writers in the sense of courting some kind of inspiration, a melody, a rhythm, a vibe; feeling some kind of spark and bringing it to the band. The goal was to get a fire going.”

While each of the players has extensive experience with other gigs — Lawton and Paczkowski with the Trey Anastasio Band and Soule Monde, and Metzger through projects such as Joe Russo’s Almost Dead — LaMP has hewed its own path.

“LaMP defiantly started with a sound right from the first show and it continues to grow as we write new songs,” Lawton says. “Someone will come in with a song — or I’ll pass along a rhythm pattern — and we’ll build from there.”

Following their Nectar’s set, the guys were hungry to return to the studio to coax to life a fresh batch of tracks. To do so, they decamped to Ben Collette’s Tank Recording Studio in Burlington for a three-day session.

“Recording is like therapy for us,” Lawton says. “Everyone is always writing and we’d built up a new batch of songs that we wanted to get down.”

“Most of these tunes started from beats Russ sent around, and Ray or I would put down a harmonic or melodic idea we thought captured the mood of the groove,” Metzger adds.

With One Of Us, the trio delivers their cleanest distillation of the LaMP sound yet, a mission statement of improvisational groupthink and compositional chops.