“Kabul” opens Pullman’s first album in two decades, and the context matters. Drummer Tim Barnes was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2021 at age 54. While his condition progressed, he and Ken “Bundy K.” Brown worked almost daily—often remotely—with collaborators from Barnes’s musical past. What started as a single compilation contribution became III, an album edited and mixed by Brown with early input from Barnes before the disease advanced too far.
The track itself sees Pullman’s ambient folk foundations expand into something more muscular without abandoning their restraint. Additional layers of instrumentation and rolling rhythms push against the group’s signature intimacy, creating tension between the spaciousness that defined their late-’90s Thrill Jockey releases and something denser, more urgent. The Chicago post-rock supergroup—Brown and Doug McCombs from Tortoise, Chris Brokaw from Come, Curtis Harvey from Rex—built their reputation on acoustic, song-adjacent instrumental music that critics compared to John Fahey and Leo Kottke. “Kabul” maintains that folk-in-spirit, post-rock-in-method approach while suggesting they’re no longer content to stay hushed.
As an instrumental opener for an album forged under these circumstances, “Kabul” carries weight beyond its musical choices. The title references a city synonymous with memory erasure through conflict and occupation. Whether intentional or not, it’s impossible to hear the track without thinking about what it means to make collaborative music while one of your core members loses access to shared history. The rolling rhythms Barnes helped create persist even as his ability to remember creating them fades. Sometimes an album opener just sets the tone. Other times, it documents what remains when memory becomes unreliable, but the work continues anyway.
B-Side Guys 
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