It doesn't do to prejudge these things, but the five stars at the top of this review were in place within a few minutes of Punch Brothers easing into their opening number, Movement and Location.
A song about baseball, it exuded restrained instrumental mastery, keen vocal expression with a startling variety of colour, a rarefied sense of dynamics and an all-round feeling of wellbeing. And then things got even better.
Welcome to the ultimate 21st-century bluegrass band. The quintet shy away from such stylistic labelling, and there are those who would consider it treachery. But bluegrass instrumentation and an innate feeling for the genre – as evidenced by guitarist Chris Eldridge's tears in my beer singing of the Seldom Scene's Through the Bottom of the Glass – give them their starting point for a musical adventure that can slip from abstract strum and twang to raging traditionalism apparently at the flick of some unseen switch.
Their interplay is awesome, with Chris Thile's mandolin producing torrents of sweetly struck, super-high-speed, mega-creative runs, fiddler Gabe Witcher adding fluent bite and Eldridge and banjoist Noam Pikelny matching the pair of them while Paul Kowert holds it all together on bass. What makes their music all the more pleasurable is the roguish sense of fun they bring to their most highly complex arrangements. From the richer than rich four-part harmony vocals on their bluegrassification of the Strokes' Heart in a Cage to Patchwork Girlfriend's throwaway vaudeville brilliance and on to Thile's liquid solo Bach interpretation during the encores, this was the sort of event for which the term gig of the year was coined.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article