Punch Brothers, The Phosphorescent Blues (Nonesuch)
OUT next week, days after the band headline Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Friday as part of Celtic Connections, this is a quite masterly collection from a quintet of virtuosi, produced by a man whose name - T Bone Burnett - has become a guarantee of quality. It would be wrong to lumber the music with the label "prog-funk", but opening track, Familiarity, is almost symphonic in its ambition, ten minutes long, running from a repetitive minimalist mandolin figure to a telling "God knows" refrain. If you are put in mind of Brian Wilson at his most experimental, that is no accident.
It is far from the whole story though. The 11 tracks feature little excursions into the songbooks of Debussy and Scriabin (the latter's Prelude a lovely little yearning interlude), bluegrass gospel in My Oh My, and pop rock that anyone would be delighted to have written. The hooky chorus of I Blew It Off is like the best of Teenage Fanclub and Magnet,which marries an irrestible riff to the wittiest of lyrics ("We're pushing each other away"), is my favourite new song of the year so far. The Phosphorescent Blues deserves to be filed next to the best work of The Beach Boys, Big Star and Richard Thompson. It's that good.
KEITH BRUCE
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