Punch Brothers!

Saw "Punch Brothers" at Lee's Palace last night. It was a mind grenade.

What a thing, to witness people pushing, there at the outer reaches of artistic excellence. You just can't take your eyes off them. You're with them, and you're thinking... "this is, conceptually, an understanding of the creative process that I'm just not equal to..." and then they take a left turn and go into their own plane, and you're totally lost. But you still can't look away, because, simply, there's something inexplicably riveting about watching somebody do something extremely well. And then just when it feels almost, maybe, like they're getting into that "arbitrary-for-the-sake-of-itself" territory, everything falls back in line and, within a single bar the entire previous detour falls into order, sortof revealing itself in retrospect as a function of what came after it.

Punch Brothers is one of those bands that can play most of a tune at 45%, throwing in little flashes of dominance to keep everybody honest, in a way that leaves you feeling like perhaps that last tune wasn't so impressive... until you take it home and destroy your left hand for 3 hours working through the intro at half-speed.

The ability to play so fast it feels slow. And then, when you want to, play so fast it feels incredibly fast! This kind of music induces a sort of rolling laughter in me.

JB