Album Review: ‘The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers’
Punch Brothers —mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, and violinist Brittany Haas— cast off and set sail boldly in search of new musical territories on their seventh album ‘The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers.’ Tacking and jibing through tumultuous and tranquil waves of sound, Punch Brothers follows the siren songs of classical, bluegrass, and jazz as they wend their way through wide channels of innovation.
The album launches with the effervescent “New Bike,” which opens with the muted strums of Thile’s mandolin and Eldridge’s guitar as they set the counterpoint for Haas’s soaring fiddle as it directs the themes of the tune. The tempo slows in the tune’s first interlude, with Thile’s and Eldridge’s plucked strings echoing Haas’ fiddling. The tonal exchanges in the tune mimic the movements of exhilaration and wonder of riding a taking off in a new direction and slowing down along the way to take stock of the surroundings.
“New Bike” fades into clattering dissonance that elides into the eleven seconds of “porthole,” a static interlude that leads into the somber and mournful “Found in a Frozen Fog,” whose first two minutes evoke the timbre of death and loss; the tune then shifts tempo and scampers off into a rollicking rush that veers between anxiety and fear and joy before the tune returns to its somber pitch. At certain points, “Found in a Frozen Fog” resembles the sonic extravaganzas of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Layers of lilting mandolin and ringing banjo and guitar flow beneath Haas’s spirited fiddling in Punch Brothers’ bright and warm version of the Norwegian air “Solve Knut (untied),” while mandolin, bass, and fiddle mimic the tumbling, rushing, and quiet moments on a country stream in “Le Ruisseau.”
Playful and jaunty, the dissonant strains of “Saturn: Pogo Ball of the Gods” wonderfully evoke the ringed planet as a child’s toy, with the gods holding onto its rings as it bounces across the night sky, skittering every which way. On the traditional “Song of the Water Kelpie (unsung),” Punch Brothers conjures up an ethereal, idyllic world whose inhabitants cavort and dash about to wondrous rhythms. The album closes with the bluegrass scamper “New Book,” a bookend to the album opener which gazes with wide eyes on the wondrous sights of a newly discovered world; each musician stretches out as they follow the tune’s melody down their own paths.
‘The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers’ nods not only to the yet-to-be-told sonic journeys of Punch Brothers on this album but also to the eleven instrumental tracks (“unsung”) on the album through which those journeys unfold. We are fortunate to have yet another superb album from these five supremely gifted musicians, and it’s clearly one of the best albums of the year so far.
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‘The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers’ will be out on Nonesuch Records on 7/24/26.
