Fox Theater

All Ashore, Punch Brothers’ fifth album and the first to be self-produced by the quintet, is both ambitious and easygoing, a lot like the “ridiculously eclectic” combo, as London’s Guardian once called the band. The work has the feel of a nine-song suite, one that invites you to unravel the threads of its connected themes and stories over repeated listening. Each track segues seamlessly, even a little sneakily, into the next. Before you know it, “The Angel of Doubt,” a dark-night-of-the-soul drama featuring a vocal from singer-mandolinist Chris Thile, has glided into “Three Dots and a Dash,” an instrumental that veers from ruminative to rave up, named in tribute to a classic Tiki cocktail, Thile’s latest recreational obsession.

Thile calls All Ashore “a meditation on committed relationships in the present day, particularly in light of the current unsettled political climate—certainly the most unsettled one that anyone in the band has ever experienced.” He continues, “We were hoping we could create a thing that would be convincing as a complete thought, sort of a nine-movement or a nine-song thought, even though it’s rangy in terms of what it’s talking about and in the characters doing the talking.”

In a more pronounced way than on prior discs, All Ashore comes across as a glimpse into Punch Brothers’ current real life, as these artists who have spent more than a dozen years playing together grapple with marriage, family, and their ever-accelerating individual careers as producers, composers, arrangers, and front men. On the album’s early tracks, it candidly addresses the state of their own world. In smart and satirical later songs like “Jumbo” and “All Part of The Plan,” it tackles the state of our collective one. Understated ballad “The Gardener” poignantly combines the personal and political in its evocation of a dedicated tradesman who brings beauty to a family’s garden but remains a stranger, a mysterious other, to them, only glimpsed occasionally from a window.

Thile has always juggled multiple projects throughout his career with Punch Brothers and as a member of Grammy Award-winning trio Nickel Creek. He currently hosts the public radio show, Live from Here, often abetted on stage by one or more Punch Brother. In 2017 alone, he released a duo album with jazz pianist and Nonesuch labelmate Brad Mehldau; a set of Bach trios with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime mentor and friend, double bassist Edgar Meyer; and Thanks for Listening, a studio set of “Song of the Week” tunes he’d composed for Live from Here.

For All Ashore, instead of recording a stack of tunes out of which they would assemble an album, Witcher explains, “We decided we would write and record this album in sequence. In doing so we were really able to construct the narrative, musically and lyrically, throughout the whole process. That was a new way of doing things for us that helped the cohesiveness and narrative.”

As Eldridge says, “It feels to me that we are a better band. The irony is that we have done way less together in the last two years than we’ve ever done. There is a beautiful familiarity to having this long-term relationship, and Punch Brothers are a thing that I expect will be a part of our lives for a long, long time. It’s a lifer band. To have that ongoing relationship, to have had a decade together, with it comes this sense that we don’t need to prove anything. We are comfortable enough with what we are, what we do, to celebrate the things that are cool and unique and creative about the band. Looking at it from that angle, our only goal was to make a record that was honest and beautiful.”

“This record is a distillation the things that only we can do,” echoes Witcher. “We wanted to focus on the things that make us unique, and I think we did. And we have a more cohesive and successful record. We’ve been around for twelve years now; we know who we are.”