Punch Brothers took their audience on a long, strange musical and imagination fueled trip to the far reaches of the galaxy during the Columbus, Ohio, stop of their Unsung North American Expedition tour. Promoting the instrumental Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers LP, the string band blended musical virtuosity with comedy to power the adventure as they performed in front of a world map plastered on the back wall of the Southern Theatre. The Brothers opened with “New Bike,” a glimmering number that benefited from the venue’s pristine sound that rendered every instrument audible. As fog rose through blue and red lights and shrouded the map, mandolinist Chris Thile, fiddler Brittany Haas, guitarist Chris Eldridge and banjoist/straight man Noam Pikelny—whom Thile referred to as “Pickles” during the sketches—moved among one another on stage with the same intricacy they brought to the music in two concurrent dances. Before long, “Pickles” was riffing about the untenable burger, a fake local delicacy derived from Earth’s most-endangered plants: “Making sustenance unsustainable since 2026,” was the punchline. Thile announced he wanted to go to another planet—a “psychopathic string-band suicide mission,” Pikelny said. But the band went to the land of make-believe and performed for the intergalactic audience of aliens around a single mic at the lip of the stage, where the band lit into the non-traditional approach to bluegrass Pikelny called “23 chords and the truth.” After “My Oh My” and “Saturn: Pogo Ball of the Gods,” a wild instrumental that recalls Frank Zappa’s orchestral pieces, the Punches entertained their celestial friends with “The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme),” a masterful cover that did sound symphonic. They announced their impending return to Earth - and the back of the stage. But first, the Punch Brothers’ update of the traditional “June Apple” was interrupted by the Bluegrass Police, who arrived by audio and slashed the band’s space tires for desecrating the genre. After the cops left—via footsteps and sirens on audio—the Punches were forced to improvise their way back home with a lengthy freeform excursion.“Rye Whiskey” and a “Julip” welcomed the fans as they returned to faux Terra firma. Bon Iver’s “Woods” and the original “All Ashore” sent them home after a wild Sept. 18 adventure.
