Punch Brothers - Punch

Released Tuesday February 26th, 2008.

Finally the next thing has arrived to dominate my obsession. Such as it is at my level of affective domain for music, it can and by definition must consume me.

The CD contains 8 tracks of original material, half written as a group, half by Chris Thile alone. What you should expect is that it is the most amazing thing I've heard to date, what you won't expect is how exactly it is that good. A 3:34 opener that was used as an early single. The next 42 minutes were composed by Chris Thile in a 4 Movement dream called The Blind Leaving The Blind. They wrap the modest length (56 minutes) 8 track album up with 3 more outstanding band compositions.

-Background-
With my mind fresh with ideas from Oliver Sacks, I wonder about what it is that makes something sound good to someone and the amount of power it is subsequently given over the mind and body. It seems that at a rudimentary level that a synthetic series of tones in intervals could be played that would please a human, but we all know that is not entirely the case. I believe that the complexity and variability is due to the close relationship of music to our language processors, not of spoken word but of music language built from experience and environment much like the dialect of spoken language is built.

Back to the topic at hand, it was not immediately clear to me what I liked about Punch. It feels like it accesses so many of my interests in music all at once. It is brimming with technical excellence, compositional complexity and honest beauty that satisfies in a way that I will spend months adjusting to.

The Letter J

p.s.
Dear Punch Brothers,
Go Punch Brothers!