Pullman : III
I don’t normally rest so heavily on marketing copy to inform a review, but there was a term used to promote the third album by post-rock ensemble Pullman that I can’t shake: song-adjacent. So in my head I imagine sounds and compositions with some or even most musical qualities, but not quite all—no solid rhythm, no melody, no links to genre. Such perceived brittle connections to what many call music might scare off listeners, but Pullman’s III is a curious release nonetheless.
Pullman first came together at the end of the 1990s, drawing on acts of post-rock derring-do from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes: Tortoise, Directions in Music, Rex, Come, Eleventh Dream Day. A wide range of densely layered, string-plucking (actual) songs pulled out the genre’s folksier influences, first on the campfire of an album Turnstyles & Junkpiles and then on the more forward-looking Viewfinder, supported by additional studio tricks and journeyman session drummer Tim Barnes. When Barnes announced an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2021, Tortoise alum and Pullman bandmate Ken “Bundy K.” Brown reached out to keep him busy playing.
Two years of those sessions were assembled into what we hear on III. This is Pullman’s shortest, most abstract release by a wide margin. The riffs and motifs that informed much of their prior two albums are mostly absent here, save for the spiraling structure of “Kabul” and the short tease of the “Valence” interlude. Instead, the players take moments like “Weightless” to weave shimmering sonic textures from multiple guitar lines, softly staccato percussion, and a variety of feedback and other generated noise. They also have their string parts collide as wind chimes might throughout the longest tracks at the center of the album—melody purely for melody’s sake.
With multiple songs containing braying distortion and other effects on guitar and banjo, III is arguably the loudest Pullman album. The big drawback here is, with more than 5 of the album’s 35 minutes occupied by silence or purposely, achingly low intros and outros, it’s also somehow the quietest. Even as a headphone trip, it has many moments where it seems to simply disappear. So I don’t know what the future holds for Pullman, but I’m at least glad the best parts of III open up a portal to discover their past.
Label: Western Vinyl
Year: 2026
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