Photo credit: Kelsea McCulloch
Few experiences are more thrilling as a music fan—and more humbling as a professional music critic—than loving a band but struggling to describe why. Pinegrove is one of those bands. I've yet to read a review that fully captures the New Jersey band's unusual allure. Calling them emo doesn't do justice to the array of influences in their sound, and calling them alt-country just makes them sound kind of boring. They're roughly the trillionth band to blend Americana and indie-rock, yet they do it in a way unlike any band before them, packing every crevice of their songs with sadness, merriment and movement. Those songs are leisurely and unhurried in spirit, yet in execution they're as compact and economical as a great punk song.
Most of the credit for that vision belongs to songwriter Evan Stephens Hall, whose wit, braininess and verbosity oozes through every verse. He writes a bit like Ben Gibbard, if Gibbard knew how to ride a horse really well and sang with a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth, and also if the Death Cab for Cutie frontman wrote around the boring stretches of his songs instead of leaning into them. And like Gibbard at the peak of his popularity, the baby-faced frontman has a gift for speaking to (and for) his admiring fans. Pinegrove's show Friday night at the Back Room at Colectivo drew a doting sold-out crowd that sang along to every song and nearly every lyric—not the easiest thing in the world to do, given how twisty and fitful some of them are.
It was a participatory show, one where the audience was as almost as much a player in the music as the band on stage. At times, watching all those bright-eyed faces sing along with such devotion, I was reminded of Dashboard Confessional's eerie MTV Unplugged special, where an almost hypnotized young crowd shadowed Chris Carrabba's every word. But Pinegrove's music is so much looser, and so much more down to earth, than Dashboard Confessional's—Hall's songs are funny and humble, even when the subject matter itself is heavy. Here the crowd wasn't singing along out of somber obligation. They were singing out of joy.
|
|
Friday's show was the last stop on the latest leg of Pinegrove's nearly perpetual tour, and the band treated it a bit like a victory celebration, playing nearly every song they've ever released, including all of their 2016 album Cardinal, as well as three new songs from an upcoming album Hall says is coming in March. Having exhausted their own material, they closed their encore with a cover: the Carol King-penned Aretha Franklin hit “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” which Hall called one of the best love songs ever written. It's such a linear, straightforward song that it really doesn't have much in common with Hall's originals at all, except for one key trait: It's an irresistible sing-along.
