In the pigeonhole-dodging stakes, THE PINES surely have a head start. They are based in the heart of the metropolis (Minneapolis at present) yet have arrived there by way of the rural climes of Iowa and Arizona, where they lived in a Mexican barrio. They wowed audiences at the 2008 SXSW in Texas and have shared stages with luminaries such as The Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, yet they look like they’ve just stepped out of John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’.
Confounded by this contradictory background material, I’m hoping they will be anything but dull and – happily – that proves to be the case. ‘Tremolo’ is virgin ground for me, though it’s actually their third album this far. Their debut slipped out on a small Iowa independent label (Trailer Records), while their second (2007’s ‘Sparrows in the Bell’ on Red House) was the one that set tongues wagging on a wider scale. Judging by the content, ‘Tremolo’ will surely continue to spread the gospel very positively indeed.
The ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ issue of The Pines’ past isn’t resolved during the course of the gripping ‘Tremolo’, but the tension makes for some inspiring listening. The band’s leading lights David Huckfelt and Benson Ramsey both submit songs and deliver them in distinctive, gravelly voices. Ramsey’s voice is especially startling for a young man, sounding as though it’s been dredged up from an ancient well o’ blues, while Huckfelt’s creepy quaver reminds me of Thin White Rope’s long-lost Guy Kyser.
The record’s sound itself is indeed engraved in Americana, though the rustic backdrops often serve as vehicles for a political dissatisfaction which is as 21st Century as Facebook or Twitter. The charged and ominous opener ‘Pray Tell’ finds Huckfelt ruminating “I asked for truth, all I got were lies/ they pulled the stars down over my eyes” while over the slow, brooding groove of ‘Shine on Moon’ he gets even hotter under the political collar, suggesting he will “take the shotgun down Capitol Hill/ twenty-nine years and I’m shackled still.” The excellent ‘Lonesome Tremolo Blues’, meanwhile, comes from a more intrinsically personal angle (“I’m a stranger here/ I’m a stranger everywhere”), but the emotional pull of its’ nomadic diaspora blues is all too palpable in 2010’s unsettled economic climate.
|
To counteract this malaise, Huckfelt and Ramsey seem to find solace of sorts in the lure of the backwoods. ‘Tremolo’ features a couple of exquisite world-weary ballads in the shape of the shimmering ‘Hearts & Bones’ and the closing ‘Shiny Shoes’, while the loping drums and whippoorwill slide guitars on ‘Meadows of Dawn’ are wonderfully descriptive. While these songs find them going back to a bucolically-recognisable modern byways America, they step back into a truly ancient Midwestern world on their covers of Spider John Koerner’s ‘Skipper & His Wife’ and Mississippi John Hurt’s ‘Spike Driver Blues’. They pull both off in fine style, especially the ‘Hey Joe’-style tale of infidelity and retribution contained within the latter.
‘Tremolo’, then, is an engrossing and occasionally sinister record. It might have been made by two guys caught between a love of the land and the lure of the bright lights, but its’ creakily accomplished Americana-soaked sound suffers from anything but an identity crisis.
The Pines online
The Pines at the Red House Records website
|
