Coach Phillips’s new LP Never Is Enough, the group’s first full-length, is catchy, and its looping melodies and smooth vocals will leave you with the sense that you’ve been listening to the band your whole life. The five-piece group, founded in 2017, self-released their EP, Learning How to Swim, in 2018. The EP was featured on NPR Music’s “Heavy Rotation” series and gained national exposure.
The group’s new nine-track LP appears something simple, with plenty of acoustic strumming, repetitive melodies, soft and slow tempos, and easy, conversational lyrics. Lead singer and songwriter, Wade Phillips, feels as if he’s talking to you, gently singing you a lullaby. The musicianship matches the apparent simplicity so perfectly, so exactly that the result is a seamlessly put together compilation that emotes the image of a group of best friends hanging out in someone’s living room in the ‘90s — comfortable, nostalgic, and just so familiar.
First track “Listerine” is short and sweet at only a minute and a half. The track has only four lyrical phrases and a single straightforward melody line, but the emotion is present. While it’s a good intro — smooth and catchy — it doesn’t feel like a fully fleshed-out track. There’s more melodies, more lines, and more harmonies that could have been delved into to create a stronger opening to the album.
The second track, “Chastity Jeans,” has a lovely melodic structure that brings higher energy. It still has a solemn tone but is more upbeat, with a forward-pushing tempo. It feels like something you would come up with hanging upside down off the bottom of your bed with your best buds, thinking, “what if.” My favorite parts of this track are the steady confidence of the lead guitar and Tom Moskal’s bass guitar lines and phrasings. The guitar line listens as a sort of background thought, behind the added harmonica, tambourine, and vocal lines and embellishments, but it fills out and grounds the track with a confident, solid, well-built foundation.
Third track “Lake Michigan Dream” is my personal favorite. The three-and-a-half-minute track is well-developed, emotive, and musically structured and layered into an impeccable product. The track utilizes the repetitive lyrical and melodic thoughts and harmonic and instrumental embellishments that are hinted at in the previous two tracks, but “Lake Michigan” brings the elements into a solid formation that isn’t lacking lyrical depth or complex thought with snippets like “it’s not unusual / to give every thought more than due process / I’ve turned cynical.”
Middle cuts “January in Seattle” and “Summer in Seattle” capture a more niche feeling than the rest of the album. “January” portrays a gloomy, nostalgic, calmness that results in a beautiful yearning. “Summer,” a minute and a half interlude, captures the city’s sunny, grunge feel, but the choice to pair the two tracks next to each other seems only based on the titles. The two don’t transition into each other very well, and, instead of allowing the progression of the LP to feel cohesive, it gives the sense that you left your playlist on shuffle.
The rest of the tracks drive through different tones of conversationality that don’t always mesh together. There’s a pleasantry and familiarity to the album — one that jogs the memory of sitting in that ’90s living room, wearing cargo shorts or a choker necklace — but that casualness makes the album feel, at times, like an afterthought, not a curated piece of art.
Crafted from Phillips’s backlog of ideas, Never Is Enough is many, small thoughts pushed together into an LP, as opposed to one body of work. Some tracks are not fully developed, such as “Listerine” and “Chastity Jeans,” while some are full pieces, such as “Delta” — which ends the LP with the melancholy, rounded out sound Coach Phillips thrives in — and “January in Seattle,” which wonderfully blends the sounds of the PNW with Phillips’s nostalgia for his home state of Michigan. However, the musicianship is there, and it will be exciting to see what flavor Coach Phillips brings to their next project.
Never Is Enough
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