The wait is over. All Them Coulee Boys’ tomorrows are today in this up-close and personable album.
Eau Claire Wisconsin’s Them Coulee Boys can’t seem to stop writing songs about change, pulled into its ebbs and flows repeatedly throughout their discography. It’s apparent from the opening song, which title-drops the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. “No Fun in the Chrysalis” could be seen as a metaphor for a moth shedding its pupa to emerge as a glorious butterfly. As songwriter Soren Staff sings in ‘Change, etc’: Change is hard we all know this / Ain’t no fun in the chrysalis / You come out new and scared as shit / Of what you’ve become.
There’s a visceral sense of urgency drilled into the band’s fifth album, which is a shift from their previous record, “Namesake,” and its thoughtful ruminations on friends and family. This work is more tightly wound with a tension that sometimes unravels when least expected. In ‘I Am Not Sad Anymore’ the key phrase is at least not today. Staff is in a reflective state about his struggles with anxiety and issues of self-worth. If one hand forms a fist / I hope the other shines a light. “I want to show that dichotomy of, you can be in good and bad places at the same time,” Staff explained.
The 11 meticulously arranged tracks seem braced for the transformation of Them Coulee Boys from regional heroes to an Americana band with nationwide appeal. The slow burn intro to ‘Mornings Like Mountains’ becomes a soaring rocker that would play from coast to coast, not just the Midwest.
Brian Joseph, who won a Grammy for his work with Bon Iver, produced the album as well as “Namesake” from Hive Studio in Wisconsin. The consistency has imparted a sense of comfort that the music is in good hands and tighter as the result. “Their art is important to me; It was effortless mastery,” Joseph states.
‘I Can’t Turn It Off” courses with explosive energy fitting for a hoedown before the rawness of Staff’s sparse Americana narrative takes over. What you got growing in your garden? / What have you let go to seed? / Will you finish what you started? / Or are you finished with me?
The songwriting is as evocative as ever. ‘As Long as You Let Me’ is a breezy two-step with pedal steel where the narrator is pleading for his lover to stay. So now I pound my chest where you used to lay your head / There’s an indentation left where it once lay.
Immersed in memories that bleed together, Staff’s nostalgic, fragmented lyrics float over the rousing country instrumentation of the band, his offhand drawl reminiscent of songwriters like Gene Clark. When Them Coulee Boys break out the four-part harmony vocals, however, that puts them into Poco territory.
The bare-bones build of ‘Ghosts (in 4 Parts) gradually swells into a jangling jam, perfect for stretching out in a live setting. ‘I Can’t Turn It Off’ comes in hot, with a driving beat and lyrics hopped up on present-tense nostalgia. ‘Harvey and Margie’ Is a finger-picked tale of a couple holding fast to a fleeting romantic interlude, seizing the little life into the love they tried to make like it’s all there is to be had.
“No Fun in the Chrysalis” is Them Coulee Boys’ biggest Avett Brothers moment yet, and they do it better than the other imitators whose attempts sometimes feel sorry when compared to this album’s rollicking energy and introspective explorations of change and growth. Its songs embrace sentimentality and memory, but the project is not overwhelmed by melancholy. Rather, it’s a collection of music filled with kind self-reflection and hopeful imagination, the emotion within the lyrics almost tangible as Staff approaches the totality of life through small, rearview glimpses of past selves.
Them Coulee Boys are still in the process of carving their own sonic niche amongst the throngs of Avett Brothers wannabes. “No Fun in the Chrysalis” suggests that they’ve figured it out.
