Pinegrove – Pinegrove on Audiotree Live
A subcategory of human roams your city’s streets. Its members envy lizards, who get to shed their whiting skins to reveal brand-new coats. NEW MONTH NEW ME. They spend their waking hours vacillating between two poles.
There’s no such thing as coincidence and everything is a sign.
Nothing happens for a reason and everything is random.
They smoke cigarettes in secret, sullenly, slovenly: faces making themselves at strangers. They mutter coffee orders to overworked baristas carrying non-dairy alternatives on their lapels: americano, they say, Brazil. They stare open-mouthed out of cafe windows, overcaffeinated, underslept, waiting for hits that never come.
Pinegrove’s brand of indie belongs in cafes with large windows that face away from larger sunsets. Cafes like the one back home: a largely empty beige room with lifeless chairs that spend their evenings facing purple and vermilion. Today, like every day, a student of creative writing likely occupies a corner of the room, dragging a sweatshop pen across a page. She’s doing a writing exercise. Learning to describe cafes, engaging each of her senses. Name five things you see, five things you hear, five things you smell, five things you touch, five things you taste. Coffee, stale smoke, the plasticky aftertaste of gas station mints, saliva, the halfway-to-death halitosis that accompanies a twilight at the butt-end of a series of half-slept nights punctuated by cigarette after reluctant cigarette. A transferred epithet; a cigarette cannot be reluctant, a cigarette experiences no emotions, a cigarette is a cigarette.
The student is training to be a reviewer of music, the student is on assignment. She has a lot of interesting things to say about Pinegrove’s live recording of their Audiotree performance, about Pinegrove, about Audiotree. About live studio recordings in the early 2000s indie scene: from KEXP through Audiotree and triple J and others, leading up to the skyrocketing popularity of the genre’s archetype – NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. About how there’s a KEXP sound, an Audiotree sound, a Tiny Desk sound. About how when it comes to listening to a studio recording, an audience doesn’t see a space, but hears it. Five things she hears - metal cutlery on ceramic plates, chattering in several languages - Bengali, English, French, Russian, a tray full of used cutlery and crockery being placed on a mantle, Pinegrove’s Problems, the Audiotree studio.
The student strives for objectivity. What do you hear? Pinegrove’s Problems. Five things you hear when you’re listening to Pinegrove’s Problems.
Bass guitar: crisp
Guitar: a nearly always clean tone
Vocals: a sometimes falsetto voice singing about how he’s ‘wast(ing) his life’ on his ‘stupid problems’
Drums: start tight, end loose
Every other indie band of that era that was fronted by a semi-poetic white man: Modest Mouse, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Shins, middle-era Spoon, post-Pavement Pitchforkcore
She writes each of these down, hesitates, thinks this is not a review, opens her inbox. Five things you see: ‘your’, ‘application’, ‘has’, ‘been’, ‘rejected’. Pinegrove’s & plays. Five things you feel – rejected like an application.
Somewhere an application’s being accepted. One of us roams your streets, counting mynas, smiling wide, thinking that’s two of them; must be good luck. It’s a new month; last month’s coat has been shed. Five things you smell –
She shuts her laptop. Everyone’s either coming or going. Wonder which I’m doing.
