A trip to the website of New Jersey indie band Pinegrove reveals that the lyrics and guitar tablature for every song on this fifth album were there before its release. In theory, a particularly dedicated fan could have shared a version of these 11 compositions before they did.
And dedicated fans is what they have. Band tattoos are commonplace (including one somewhere about the person of the actress Kristen Stewart) usually of an ampersand or the interlocking squares on the sleeve of their breakthrough 2016 album, Cardinal. Band leader Evan Stephens Hall has said that he hasn’t been any more specific about where he’s currently living than the country in upstate New York, because “the Pinenuts are a little nutty”.
Judging by the size of the venues on their forthcoming tour dates (which include the Roundhouse in Camden in May) most of those fans also seem to have forgiven Stephens Hall following a long Facebook post in 2017 in which he revealed he had been accused of “sexual coercion”, and apologised. A lack of specifics have made it difficult to determine whether the band’s temporary cancellation (a year of silence including weekly therapy for Stephens Hall, at the request of his accuser) is penance enough. Or maybe it’s a new bunch of blissfully unaware newbies buying all those tickets, having arrived at the group’s loose-limbed, literate, country-tinged rock via charming Spotify playlists with names such as “Garden Indie”, “Infinite Indie Folk” and “Pumpkin Spice”.
As a thoughtful lyricist with ambitions to write longform prose, Stephens Hall has generally dealt in universal sentiments rather than details that could only apply to him. He often speaks directly and with a reassuring warmth – the 2018 song Skylight had him repeating: “Whatever you’re feeling is natural.” Here, however, he’s more political than personal, using pictures of the natural world to despair at the climate emergency. Birds twitter during a peaceful lull in the opening song, Habitat, but it sounds more like he’s mourning them on Flora when he sings: “I’m walking outside, nothing feels good.” The sky he describes in Orange is that colour because of wildfires.
That title, 11:11, might look like a line of trees and also refers to the 11th hour, time running out. It’s a shame there isn’t more urgency to the music, which finds some spark on Alaska but more often, though pretty, tends to plod.
