It was night, around 11:30 p.m. The color of the sky was somewhere between dark blue and black and you could hear the faint hum of fluorescent lights hovering above the parking lot. The asphalt still warm from the previous day’s baking sun. The air was stagnant, and the smell of car exhaust mixed with the odor of French fry grease wafting over from the fast food restaurant across the street. Feelings of aimlessness and bewilderment hang as heavy in the air as the odors.
I’m fascinated with the concept of being able to capture a moment in a piece of art. It’s a very complicated process to remember something, and then be able accurately to recreate the feeling and atmosphere of that memory, to snare it and translate it into a painting or a song that hits you with the immediacy of the original moment. It is what good photographer or an excellent haiku writer does. It is what Pinebender does.
Pinebender does a beautiful job of reproducing an exact mood and presenting instantaneously. With their melodic, lethargic rock combo of guitar, bass, drums and occasionally vocals, the songs transcend ordinary songs. They become aural photographs.
As descriptive as I put the beginning scenario, a sense of the atmosphere did not hit you all at once. That’s an inherent characteristic of writing. There is a beginning, a middle, an end. You cannot just take it all in at one moment. A lot of pop songs are like that They have a beginning, a middle and an end. They read from left to right. The songs Pinebender makes hit you all at once. They move and change, but the original feeling remains the same.
The photographs on the cover of Things Are About to Get Weird give the same impression. The architectural spaces glow with a loneliness, an oddly vacant quality. The mood just hits you. Song titles like “The Depth of the Silence Was Reigning Over the Veranda,” and “So, This Is Your Apartment,” reflect the sentiment.
Pinebender doesn’t set out to create real life moments with these songs. The songs themselves already are moments.