Hell on Church Street

The death of Tony Rice on Christmas Day 2020 robbed bluegrass of one of its most influential musicians. Béla Fleck’s 2021 album My Bluegrass Heart was in part an homage to his old friend and 2022 opens with Punch Brothers paying tribute to Rice with an album that re-imagines the late guitarist’s landmark 1983 solo album Church Street Blues, track for track from trad bluegrass tunes by Bill Monroe (‘The Gold Rush’ and ‘Jerusalem Ridge’) to covers of songs by 1960s Greenwich folk heroes such as Dylan and Tom Paxton.

There’s plenty of wild old-time picking from the quintet of Chris Eldridge (guitar), Paul Kowert (bass), Noam Pikelny (banjo), Chris Thile (mandolin) and fiddler Gabe Witcher on the more up-tempo material and the results are thrilling enough. But Punch Brothers are at their most striking when they slow it down and go for that high and lonesome mountain sound, with Thile’s voice all keening and haunting on the trad ‘House Carpenter’ and, best of all, Gordon Lightfoot’s dramatic ballad ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’. They even manage to reclaim ‘Streets of London’ and ‘Last Thing on My Mind’ from the realms of over-familiar cliché and invest them with an air of mystery.