Pullman’s III reviewed: welcome comeback for post-rock supergroup

For a few short years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pullman operated as an odd supergroup featuring members of Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day, Come and Loftus. Those bands had all toured and played together in the 1990s, and this particular side-project allowed the musicians to wander down different musical paths. Instead of heavy guitars, motorik beats and post-rock soundscapes, they trafficked in acoustic picking and strumming, devising a folky palette akin to John Fahey and a contemplative mood often compared (both favourably and unfavourably) to Windham Hill. Pullman recorded just two albums before they dispersed back to their dayjob bands: the largely acoustic Turnstyles And Junkpiles in 1998 and the more daring Viewfinder in 2001.

More than 20 years later, the band – which includes multi-instrumentalists Ken “Bundy K” Brown, Doug McCombs, Chris Brokaw, Curtis Harvey and Tim Barnes – reconvened to make a third album, matter-of-factly titled III, and what’s remarkable is how it jumps right back into the spirit of their early sessions, how it sounds exactly like the record they might have made right after Viewfinder. New songs like “Bray” and “Weightless” are anchored in acoustic instruments, but everything has been manipulated and distressed, sometimes heavily and sometimes subtly, to create a blown-out distortion that contributes to rather than distracts from the curious ambience.

That makes III an incredibly well-timed comeback. On one hand, the Chicago post-rock and improvisational scene is currently experiencing a resurgence of activity and attention, thanks largely to the community coalescing around the label International Anthem (which recently released Tortoise’s own comeback record). More crucially, this kind of folksy ambient sound has become much more prevalent over the past few years, thanks to artists like SUSS, North Americans and Chuck Johnson. In retrospect, those first two albums sound oddly prescient, which means the band no longer sounds so far afield.

The band didn’t actually reunite for III, at least not physically. Rather than book time together in a studio – a logistical nightmare for a band whose members are scattered across the country – they crafted these songs like exquisite corpses, each member adding his own parts and sending it along to the others. The result is something none of the players could have dreamed up, but something that makes room for serendipity and individual personalities, as though no time had passed at all. But of course, a lot of time has passed, a lifetime of playing and refining and listening and thinking and ageing. In 2020 Barnes was diagnosed with early onset dementia, and while that did not prompt Pullman’s reunion, it did add a sense of urgency to the proceedings. “I don’t think it was at the forefront of any of our minds as we were working on it,” Brown told Uncut. “However, as I was assembling and then mixing everything, it did occur to me that there was something in the overall feel of the music that suggested altered perception, maybe even different neural states. So I kind of leaned into that.”

These songs move and build organically, the notes mushrooming into unexpected shapes. A three-note bass them anchors the shimmering “Weightless”, which flickers in and out of focus during its seven-minute runtime and hovers almost out of earshot before gradually settling into silence. “October” moves in more of a straight line, mixing crisp electric guitar with a rustle of synths. It grows gradually fuller and more declarative, culminating in a heraldic guitar lick that sounds caught in a heavy wind. Pullman emphasise mood and texture above all else, but the music always moves purposefully, even when the destination doesn’t seem clear.

One of the more poignant moments occurs on the short “Valence”, which places a noodly electric guitar and a spry rhythm section over the sound of a crowd. It’s not even a minute long, but something about the chatter of so many conversations – recognisable as human voices, but with almost no discernible words – feels essential to III. It was taken from a live recording made during Pullman’s last tour in 2002, which makes it a direct account of their shared past. The band remain intrigued with the idea of using instruments in ways that aren’t quite recognisable in any neural state, in making the familiar sound new and jarring. “Valence” bleeds into closer “Kabul”, which features a banjo so distorted that it no longer sounds like any known instrument after just a few measures. The effect, like the rest of this imaginative album, is as beautifully disorienting as it is mesmerising.

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