PUNCH Brothers by name, and they certainly didn't pull any during this exhilarating blast of "nugrass" string band virtuosity. From their opening tune, the band were cruising nicely, Gabe Witcher's full-toned fiddle sounding over the whirr of Noam Pi
kelny's banjo, Chris Eldridge's guitar and, of course, the mercurial ringing of Chris Thile's mandolin, while Greg Garrison's double bass laid down the road.
Thile, who cuts a slightly manic figure somewhere between Sting and Stan Laurel, gives the impression of a man utterly in thrall to his music, swaying and jerking as he whips up a tune, but he was well matched in this line-up, as they shifted between the old-time homeliness of Ocean of Diamonds and the astringent chording of Thile's own Punch Bowl. Another Thile number was How to Grow a Woman From the Ground, his mournful holler flipping into disquieting falsetto. But his penchant for songs of almost ecstatic melancholy didn't prevent much exuberant soloing and sparring between instruments.
Thile's extraordinary four-movement suite for bluegrass ensemble, The Blind Leaving the Blind, remains a centrepiece of their performance, but they just played three movements, separating the first from the third and fourth with other numbers – possibly to ease its digestion by impatient bluegrass purists. Full of sometimes startling shifts in tempo and mood, and occasional longueurs, there was much that was engaging here, the music sometimes delicately couching Thile's rueful lyrics, spiked with discordant bursts, pulsing in dramatic waves of string sound or accelerating into full-tilt breakdown.
Unlike its decidedly mixed reception at Celtic Connections in January, this time the piece went down a storm, and by the time they were approaching encore time with Gillian Welch's Wayside (Back in Time), the yeehah! factor was rising fast.
The full article contains 302 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
