Pinegrove

Rough Trade Records • 2022

With the recent ‘Pinegrove Shuffle’ internet trend I had to investigate at least enough to turn the thing inside out and completely marginalize the band as some sort of derivative Death Cab for Cutie ripoff. Well, they are. Sort of. However, they do it really well. To be a conduit for an expression while incoherently letting the foundation of contextual inspiration be somewhat ostensible and vague is no simple task. Pinegrove has the ability to bring a sort of nostalgia to the listener without necessarily seeming to desire to do so. 11:11 is an Americana take on emotive punk music with a sense of timing and mobility that you don’t get to hear often these days. Reminiscent of the Emo band Elliott from Kentucky with some serious Ben Gibbard channeling, this album has a sweet sentiment to it and could’ve easily made it on the soundtrack to Laguna Beach:The Real OC. This album in particular is well produced and seems to be a last ditch effort for the band to make a career out of music. It’s good background music, but it’s sort of a repeating and cyclic shtick of dreary minimalism that has been done. In that regard, I would have to say it has an early-ought retrogression that seems to be a bit boring to those of us that already heard the sound’s forebears.

7/10