What an extraordinary band are The Punch Brothers, a bunch of conspicuously talented musicians whose six albums never fail to delight and stimulate as they push the boundaries of acoustic music to what you think would be beyond breaking point. It’s been said that they’ve taken “bluegrass to its next evolutionary stage, drawing equal inspiration from the brain and the heart”.
Virtuosos all, The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers marks the debut of fiddler Brittany Haas with the band which, in addition to Chris Thiele, includes Chris Eldridge on guitar, Paul Kowert on bass, and Noam Pikelny on banjo. A sought-after session and touring musician whose credits include US TV host Steve Martin’s bluegrass band, Haas managed to pursue her youthful career while earning a degree in evolutionary biology at Princeton. She also plays banjo and sings, though there are no vocals on this, the seventh Punch Brothers album. Thiele, who hails from a family of classical musicians, began playing mandolin at age five and three years later became part of Nickel Creek. He made his solo album debut at just 13 and anyone who hasn’t heard it urgently needs to check out Into the Cauldron which featured jaw-dropping arrangements of Charlie Parker and JS Bach. He’s since mixed it with classical superstars Hilary Hahn and Yo-Yo Ma, and he formed The Punch Brothers (named from a Mark Twain short story) on 4 July 2006, back in the day when everyone felt like celebrating America’s birthday.
Unsung is an album of original material plus three folk song arrangements. But the band defies categorization, and in their music can be discerned not just the influence of Bach and Parker, but a whole gamut of 20th century styles (impressionism, atonality) and composers, including Bartok and Reich, with all its shifting minimalist repeating rhythmic patterns, and bands including The Beatles and Radiohead, with acoustic covers of the latter’s "Kid A" and "Paranoid Android”, as well as (of course) bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe.
There’s no drummer, so The Punch Brothers often rely on interlocking streams of rapid, equal-notes (moto perpetuo, a feature of Bach) to drive the music’s momentum, creating the illusion of breathless energy – “The Frozen Frog” is a good example. The folk tropes of their arrangement of “Solve Knut” are easily discernible, but the richness and complexity of the musical weave into which it is sewn are breathtaking. It leads into “Le Ruisseau,” which translates as “stream”, which is just so incredibly programmatic, the stream a trickle, then a gush, and you can “hear” the sun glinting upon it. The whimsically titled “Saturn: Pogo Ball of the Gods” highlights superlative bass and fiddle playing building to a manic and dissonant tutti climax before segueing into the gentle “Song of the Water Kelpie”, another traditional number.
The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is a trip every bit as exhilarating as that Thiele remembers from his first ride on his Diamondback Topanga mountain bike when he was ten years old which inspires the album’s penultimate track.
