Punch Brothers' new album, Who's Feeling Young Now?, is out this week. The band will appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Wednesday, performing the album track "New York City." Check out a preview video with the song here. The New York Times includes the album on this week's Playlist, saying the band is focusing on "playful storytelling on this album," noting though "their mind-boggling cover of Radiohead’s 'Kid A.'” The New Yorker features the album in the Listening Booth, describing it as "a mystical alchemy of old-time music and contemporary sensibilities." In the UK, where the band is the subject of a feature article in the Observer, the Daily Telegraph gives the album a perfect five stars.
Punch Brothers' new album, Who's Feeling Young Now?, is out in the UK today and in North America on Tuesday. To celebrate, the band will appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Wednesday night, performing the album track "New York City." Tune in to NBC Wednesday night at 11:35 PM ET. And to get a sneak peek of the album track "New York City," check out the preview video below.
And speaking of New York City, The New York Times music critic Nate Chinen includes the new album on this week's Playlist. Chinen finds that the band has "shifted the emphasis from instrumental wizardry to playful storytelling on this album," though he adds parenthetically: "Not entirely, of course. Here too is their mind-boggling cover of Radiohead’s 'Kid A.'” Read more at nytimes.com.
The New Yorker features the album in the top spot in its Listening Booth of the week's new releases, describing it as "a mystical alchemy of old-time music and contemporary sensibilities" and offering a stream of the album's opening track, "Movement and Location." Read more and hear the track at newyorker.com.
Watch the preview video featuring "New York City" here. You can also see it and the two earlier previews, with "Movement and Location" and "Clara," at nonesuch.com/media.
Back in the UK, where the Guardian recently gave four stars to the new album from this "remarkable band," today's Daily Telegraph gives it a perfect five stars out of five. "Even though musically it’s sharper than ever," writes the Telegraph's Ivan Hewett of the band, "underneath the astounding variety of styles there’s a 'plain-speaking,' which provides emotional truth."
The band is the subject of a feature article in this week's Observer. "There's nothing easily classifiable about this five-piece ensemble who have proved as welcome at Carnegie Hall as they are headlining festivals," writes the Observer's Emma John. "Thile created the band six years ago to record an experimental, 40-minute quintet he had composed. And while the blazing ambition of their music has not dimmed a single watt, their latest album, Who's Feeling Young Now?, the follow-up to 2010's Antifogmatic, is the one that promises to transmit it to a wider audience." Read what the band has to say in the feature article at guardian.co.uk.
Back in the States, the album is this week's critic's pick in the Lexington Herald Leader. "Mostly, Who's Feeling Young Now? is the combination of five bluegrass-bred players laying waste to acoustic music expectations," writes reviewer Walter Tunis, "even the kind bolstered over the years with the jazz and classical accents of "new grass" contemporaries. This is very much a rugged pop album with shades of rockish anguish. It's just that the music is presented, as it was on the first two Punch Brothers albums, with traditional bluegrass instrumentation." Read the review at kentucky.com.
There's one more day to pre-order the album and receive a custom five-coaster set illustrated by the New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee, signed by the band. To do so, and receive high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the album starting tomorrow, head to the Nonesuch Store now.
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