EXPERIMENTAL
BY JOHN MULVEY
Pullman
★★★★
III
WESTERN VINYL. DL/LP
Post-rock folk supergroup reconvene.
The first Pullman album, 1998’s Turnstyles & Junkpiles, has long been one of the secret treasures of the Tortoise musical universe: an album that applied beatless post-rock strategies to the massed acoustic guitars of one ongoing Tortoise member, Douglas McCombs, and a former one, Bundy K Brown, plus Chris Brokaw (Come) and Curtis Harvey (Rex). Three years later a follow-up, Viewfinder, added a drummer – Tim Barnes – without materially disrupting the music’s hazy delicacy. Now, finally, there’s this unexpected and poignant III, a project instigated by Brown with Barnes in 2021 when the latter revealed his early-onset Alzheimer’s. The six tracks on III fade in and out of focus, occasionally operating on the very fringes of audibility. But when they coalesce, Pullman’s dappled brilliance remains, sounding as they still do like John Fahey multiplied and remixed; Brown’s post-production science turning these intricate guitar matrixes into something smeared, meditative and wholly transporting.