Punch Brothers will be making their very first appearance as a band on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno tonight on NBC. The guys will play "Punch Bowl," the first track off their new record, Punch. You can preview that track and the song "Nothing, Then" at nonesuch.com/punch. You can also hear "Punch Bowl" here:
The Tonight Show starts at 11:35 PM ET. For more information, visit nbc.com.
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On this week's All Songs Considered podcast, you can hear the album's closing track, "It'll Happen." The show's host, introduces the Punch Brothers track with this: "After seeing Chris Thile play for our webcast with his band Nickel Creek, I was sure that I had just seen the most astonishing musician I had ever seen live." You can listen to the latest episode of All Songs Considered on npr.org here and the webcast of Nickel Creek's "Farewell (For Now)" concert, recorded live last November, here.
Punch Brothers' appearance on All Things Considered, originally scheduled for Wednesday, will now air on today's show. The show airs from from 4–6:30 PM ET on WNYC, 93.9 FM in New York, and 5–7 PM PT on KCRW, 89.9 FM in Los Angeles, and can be heard streaming live on the stations' respective websites. Visit npr.org for further local listings or to listen to All Things Considered online beginning around 7 PM ET.
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In a four-star review of the new album in The Guardian, Robin Denselow compares the boundary-breaking tunes on Punch to label mate Rokia Traoré's collaboration with the Kronos Quartet on her album Bowmboï. "What we have here," he writes of Punch, "is a new musical style," one he calls "intriguing, unusual and very classy." Denselow refers to Thile for his "extraordinary virtuoso playing, writing and singing" and, equally important, for his moving "the American country-folk scene into an unexpected direction. He's a mandolin player, but in his hands the instrument becomes more versatile than ever."
In the album's centerpiece, The Blind Leaving the Blind, Denselow finds Thile matching "his charming, easy going vocal work against passages where guitar, bass, banjo and fiddle follow the intricate twists and turns of his writing."
To read the review, visit arts.guardian.co.uk.
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In today's New York Times, music critic Nate Chinen explores the history and the recent resurgence of bluegrass and roots music in the City, citing as an example a set Chris Thile joined in on at the intimate Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side as one of many events taking place in the new roots music scene.
Chris spoke to the Times about the ever-evolving musical form with which he has long been associated, and working against an outdated misperception that going to a folk-music concert is a staid affair. “There’s a perception we have to fight through as folk musicians," he tells Chinen. "Like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to go to this concert and get in touch with our roots.’ That’s totally valid, but it’s also like visiting a museum.”
To read Chinen's article on the contemporary roots music scene in New York, visit nytimes.com.
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George Varga of the Bend Weekly out of Oregon calls The Blind Leaving the Blind "equal parts folk, bluegrass, jazz and contemporary classical," praising the piece as "a brave and daring work, especially in an era of ring-tone-length attention spans and lowest-common-denominator pop music."
Varga finds that "the music unfolds over time to reveal a rich tapestry of styles and sounds that require---and reward---attentive listening." Chris himself confirms in the Weekly: "that that is exactly what we're trying to do."
To read the article, visit bendweekly.com.
Click here to add the Punch CD plus free album MP3s, including the bonus download, "Bailey," direct to your Shopping cart for $15.98.