GENTLE BRONTOSAURUS
GENTLE BRONTOSAURUS:
Huan-Hua Chye: vocals, guitars, keyboards, ukulele
Nick Davies: vocals, keyboards, trumpet
Paul Marcou: drums, percussion, vocals
Scott Stetson: vocals, guitars
Anneliese Valdes: bass guitar, vocals, conch
all music and lyrics by Huan-Hua Chye except
"Edge To Lose" and "Agatha's Ashes" music and lyrics by Scott Stetson
"Feelings Of An Earthquake" music and lyrics by Nick Davies
"Cassini" music and lyrics by Huan-Hua Chye & Tom Morton
Cover Illustration by Huan-Hua Chye
Graphic Design by Scott Stetson
Produced, Recorded and Mixed by Gentle Brontosaurus
Released February 13, 2026
"Can't pretend that growing older never hurts"
-Pete Townshend
"Slit Skirts"
I am going to begin this piece by extoling the virtues of another band.
A band that has long possessed an enormous piece of my musical heart, ever since their debut album "Love Junk" (released October 26, 1988) arrived within my Freshman year of college is The Pursuit Of Happiness. As led by singer/songwriter/guitarist Moe Berg, the band's signature ABBA meets AC/DC sound of sweeping to soaring melodicism and vocal harmonies combined with sledgehammer hard rock swagger over the course of their five albums continues to hit a sweet spot after many decades.
Yet, what truly gave this band their eternal status with me has always been via Berg's peerless songwriting, which feels like the short story chronicles of the lives, loves, loses, hopes, fears and often devastating failures of the albums' not-as-young-anymore cast of characters, figures who occupy the exact same world as the listener as the songs are sprinkled with cultural references grounding the stories to a specific time and place while always remaining existential.
Through dark, biting humor, sardonic word play, unapologetically carnal knowledge filtered through genuine understanding and empathy, Berg with The Pursuit Of Happiness delivered music bathed in themes of self awareness, arrested development, painful heartaches and the benchmark moments where life pivots from one phase into the next...should the song's characters allow themselves the opportunity to listen to the messages of their circumstances and their inner voices.
The Pursuit Of Happiness existed within a certain rarefied air of alt-rock/pop songcraft, of which I would also include the likes of Fountains Of Wayne, Belle and Sebastian and The New Pornographers.
And to my ears and heart, I am now implored to include Gentle Brontosaurus.
The Madison, WI based quintet Gentle Brontosaurus, to whom I became introduced to via their lovely previous release "Bees Of The Invisible" (released May 12, 2018), a breezy collection of sunshine drenched confections perfectly designed for a Summer's day at a park or garden party. With the release of their latest album, "Three Hares," their first in eight years, Gentle Brontosaurus has arrived with a deeply involving work that takes the twee elements of past material and expands the sonic palate to to serve what I hear as a darkly emotional song cycle filled with the short stories and character studies of people--some young, others in young middle age--facing down hard questions of identity, choices, placement, consequences and a developmental stasis.
Gentle Brontosaurus' "Three Hares" opens with the excellent "Luxury Bones," composed by the band's chief songwriter Huan-Hua Chye, " which sets the table for the album.
"When we were in second grade
They asked us what we wanted to be
I never thought that I would say
An insurance actuary
But there's no market for
A hundred thousand ballerinas
A hundred thousand quarterbacks
Filling sports arenas"
Immediately gripping with its lament, presented in equal parts humor and sorrow, the romance of youth and the reality of adulthood collide in a world ruled by numbers in which "there's no room for dreamers" (a lyric that leapt out of my headphones on first listen), the stage is expertly set for the remainder of the album to come.
The mini-suite of both the bouncy "Major Arcana" and the startling, voyeuristic "My Favorite Monster," Chye writes tales of people seeking emotional fulfilment yet finding themselves overtaken by Tarot astrology and potential porn addiction, respectively. It is here where Gentle Brontosaurus begins to flex their musical muscles from their specialized brand of sweetly decorated pop towards sounds that are more overtly aggressive, dynamic, even sinister, perfectly encasing Chye's storytelling with the precisely delivered musical bedrock. And again, lyric's like "Loneliness looks just like a man" propelled themselves to my ears.
"Tumbleweed" finds the band observing a couple dining at a local Denny's "eating Moon Over My Hammy" accompanied by Nick Davies' despondent trumpet suggesting either sad margueritas or a desire for margueritas to numb the stilted moment between the two on a Summertime slow night...just like the ones before.
"Nothing around here changes
So, we're just killing time
Current status: stasis
Frozen, with a pump or two of cherry lime..."
The restlessness of a relationship, a life or an existence not advancing even as time rests for no one. The urgent desire to leave yet being fearful of change is palpable as the song yearns passionately for an escape. "Tumbleweed, you and me, let's go," our protagonist pleads over and again.
Yet, as you can probably guess, she most likely won't.
Guitarist, and new band member since 2019, Scott Stetson arrives with "Edge To Lose," the first of his two selections, this one starring a self described "First time caller, long time listener/Part time backer, full time prisoner" fending off isolation through the rabbit hole of talk radio and conspiracy theories. The desire for connection and understanding dovetailing into the building a false reality based upon grievances he may not have ever held in the first place but has now adhered himself to makes for a decidedly unconnected existence as represented by Gentle Brontosaurus' punchier attack, augmented by Chye's woozy keyboards and Stetson's lyrical guitar solos.
Affairs of the heart take up space over the album's next two tracks, Chye's girl group vibe "Bend The Knee," and the astral "Cassini," composed by Chye and Tom Morton, her collaborator in their joint side project Vowl Sounds. In the former, we find a couple at the end of a union begun with the physical motion and continued through the emotional capitulations of the song's title.
"And it feels a little sad, my love
Because I think we really tried
I wore your ring like a bandage
A blindfold for my starry eyes"
In the latter, we find ourselves in the middle of an extramarital affair, self described "destroyers on a suicide mission," already fallen into the false intimacy traps of sharing wine on the balcony while debating the validity or insufferably of Neil DeGrasse Tyson (a terrific detail) while attempting to cloak the loneliness ("I kiss your forehead and pretend you would be truer to me").
Two songs of two romances where there are no happy endings continues to give the album a sincere emotional weightiness whose impact is made further through the elegant songwriting and performances.
Stetson's "Agatha's Ashes" taken Gentle Brontosaurus back to the garage with the late period Tom Petty styled track, which feels to be an exploration of mortality, grief, loss and the quandary of finding or rejecting meaning when life suddenly expresses a certain meaninglessness.
As a counterpoint, the subversive jubilant Chye's "Loneliest Bird" arrives with a Nick Davies trumpet fanfare that made me think of the late John Entwistle's occasional brass punctuations in selections by The Who. This song's characters, the titular "loneliest birds" of Nigel and Martha represent a human dichotomy: the singular feelings of isolation which contribute to the overall feeling of aloneness in the world are in actuality universal feelings, experienced long before and after we are here and gone.
"Three Hares" enters its final stretch with the outstanding, painful, cathartic "Blue." Set in 1992 and starring Yu-Tin and her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she ponders just what if she could possibly be different, be something or someone else in a White American world fueled by White American beauty myths and standards.
"I just want to be an All American, corn fed, apple pie girl
Milk-pale skin, calling my parents by their first names, hair that
Holds a curl
Prying open my eyes in the mirror
Trying to make them just a little bit bigger
Trying out names that sound just a little bit whiter
Wishing my eyes were blue"
It is a thunderstorm of a song which finds Gentle Brontosaurus operating at full power, with muscle and melodicism, ensuring Huan-Hua Chye's personal song becomes a full band statement. It is an open hearted high wire of a song which in just four minutes explores identity, self-loathing and cultural rejection, the need for belonging while inwardly struggling for self-acceptance and the universal plight that exists when we all wish, at one time or another, if we could just be anything other than what we naturally are. I would argue, that in the band's brief catalog of material, "Blue" is their highest achievement to date.
Nick Davies' "Feelings Of An Earthquake," inspired by a real event, brings the album to its' poignant close.
"I feel the fault lines
Moving at the base of my spine...
...It feels alright
The whole room sways left and right
And at the same time
Everything on wheels rolls away
I've got the ghostly sense of a loss
Of the only coordinate set that I had
Now I'm feeling lost
I'm left with nothing to measure against
No firm unit of distance
As everything shifts
Everything shifts"
It would be the song to break you if not for the band leaning richly into the "Gentle" side of its moniker. Davies' sensitive vocals as surrounded by his mournful trumpet and Scott Stetson's equally aching guitar lines, Chye's keyboards, the tender backing vocals of both Chye and bassist Annaliese Valdes and the glide of drummer Paul Marcou's ride cymbal and snare superbly cushions the impact of a full album of emotional earthquakes, leaving powerfully pensive aftershocks in its wake...just before you press "PLAY" all over again.
It may seem odd to you but as I listened to Gentle Brontosaurus' "Three Hares," I found myself often thinking of the controversial, divisive third season of "The Bear." Critically and through fan discussions on-line, there contained a tenor that this was the season of the series in which "nothing happened." For me, I felt completely the contrary as it was the season in which I thought everything happened. Yes, it was a season completely in stasis and for me, I felt it to be the point as we had been given the lives, traumas and anxieties of a collective of characters and this third season was the one where we observed and felt them wrestling with their pasts, desiring different futures but were all unaware or unable to piece together just how to move forwards even as life in always moving forwards.
Gentle Brontosaurus' "Three Hares" delves into this sentiment brilliantly as they have weaved together a tapestry of situations in a non-judgmental, enormously humane fashion with a sense of songcraft that ensures the listener will not be undone by the experience while we are asked to embrace and understand these stories and characters. In doing so, the band have released their best album to date. It is beautifully sequenced. It is their best sounding album which finds the quintet flexing their muscles to include a wider range of textures and abilities while never eschewing that certain twee quality that remains their trademark.
As I have gotten to experience and furthermore, gotten to know and to have been befriended by several of the bands in Madison, WI., I am again amazed with the amount of talent, skill and artistry on display right here in my city, which I feel could easily stand shoulder to shoulder with more widely established and even legendary artists. Over and again, I have expressed upon this site the wonderment I feel witnessing a band made up of individuals who are all serving the song in question and without any display of ego whatsoever. Gentle Brontosaurus fits this description and then some and with "Three Hares," they have emerged with a work of art that deserves the fullest of your attention and appreciation, especially in a musical field that is fully saturated with artists looking to be noticed.
Returning to The Pursuit Of Happiness for a moment, I am thinking of a song that possibly describes how this album feels to me. The song in question is one called "Tree Of Knowledge," and the lyric that comes to mind is the following:
"He feels like he's falling, falling
Out of grace and into knowledge"
Gentle Brontosaurus' "Three Hares" feels like this, a collection of songs starring people who are just like you and myself, all trying to just figure out what existence in this life, at this point in our collective history actually means and could be...should we allow ourselves the impetus to keep trying when we feel unsafe, unappreciated, unfocused, unmoored, unseen and unloved.
This is what empathy sounds like and Gentle Brontosaurus' "Three Hares" is already one of my favorite albums of 2026.
