The Pinecones (SCQ's Year-End Questionnaire Part V)

Sage, probably the first great record I heard in 2010, has lost none of its allure since that second week in January. Better yet, its efforts to broaden The Pinecones’ reach after We Were Strangers…‘ piano-based pop feel as natural and good-natured under psychedelic lens as any Kinks record from the mid 60s. Lead songwriter Brent Randall speaks like a man who has been there, talking dreamily about hosting tea parties and writing songs in gardens.

SCQ: Every list-lover's favourite question: what are your top albums of 2010? Feel free to include any older yet worthy records you discovered this year.

BR: Dr. Ew (Drew Smith of The Bicycles) put out a really neat album called Gadzooks. Toppermost of the poppermost. The Stance in Halifax put out their nifty full-length debut early this year - that's also a treat. In terms of older stuff I discovered, my girlfriend turned me on to this guy Jimmy Campbell who put out some albums in the early 70's - "Jimmy Campbell's Album" is particularily mindblowing. Oh, I also really like B.A. Johnston's new album "Thank You For Being a Friend." It is really great. The average music fan, while enjoying his live show, may be quick to write off his albums as novelty but this new one in particular is just a straight up good album.

SCQ: What were you listening to a lot of while recording the excellent Sage?

BR: Something Else by the Kinks. Ian Whitcomb's Mod Mod Musical Hall. Voices in Fun - The Four Freshman.
"Muffin Man" - Land of Oz. The Hollies.

SCQ: Be cocky for once in your life: what was the finest thing you did all year? That moment where you actually thought "shit, I nailed that..."?

BR: The Missuss.

SCQ: Effect and Cause: In mid February I acquired an intense fever that rendered me immobile. Instead of sleeping or watching bad movies, I stretched out in the SCQ office and listened exclusively to The Pinecones' warm and uplifting record. Essentially, you cured me. Okay, your turn: confess a true tale that inspired one of the songs on Sage.

BR: Unfortunately all the songs are pretty self explanatory. Sage and Marigold were co-written in a friend of mine's garden. We spent the summer hanging about in his garden and wrote those two numbers. Mr. Shoemaker man was written while I was searching for work and I used to walk by a particular cobbler shop and I always wished I could work there. Jenny Ardmore, we all had crushes on this one waitress at a favourite tea room of ours, that's about her. I suppose "O Ivy" is a little funny because it was sort of about a fantasy encounter that later came true after I wrote the number.

SCQ: If all the reasonable and implausible ideas in your head came to fruition in 2011, what would they be?

BR: I'll own sevens suits, one in every colour. Seven minis, one in every colour. I'll get to make a living by professional hosting tea parties. I'll own a seafoam green piano.

SAGE - The Pinecones

SAGE

The Pinecones
Just Friends Records.

SCQ Rating: 83%

A record like SAGE would usually elicit a rant of my revivalist prejudices well before I unwrapped the cellophane. Something about how modern bands reap the flower-power generation of all its clichés, something about how too many acts are dancing on the shoulders of Beatles’ psychedelia, Joy Division nihilism, or the John Hughes’ cinematic zeitgeist. Luckily, I didn’t even know what The Pinecones were about when first listening to their sophomore’s title track but having taken in SAGE’s bounty of ripe guitar licks and vocal harmonies, my revivalist rant needn’t apply. Unlike recent borrowers like The Soundcarriers, The Pinecones’ don’t treat their 60s muse as a crutch to assemble half-original songs, instead opting to write unapologetically classic compositions that rival those of the Kinks or fellow East-Coasters Edward Bear. A record like SAGE has been long overdue.

Chances are, even those who celebrated the band’s previous album We Were Strangers In Paddington Green don’t know what the Pinecones are really about. Taking a left turn from their debut’s refined piano-laced pop, Brent Randall and His Pinecones abandoned the hierarchy and reformed as four equal songwriters singing their own material under the name The Pinecones. The potential risk involved with Randall’s loosening of the reigns pays significant dividends on SAGE, with each Pinecone contributing uniquely structured tracks to flesh out this psych-heavy exploration. The summery jam ‘Never Seen the Likes’ keeps the album’s back-end spritely while ‘Jenny Fur’, in its guitar stabs and runaway chorus, has the feel-good power to be jangling over a raucous beer commercial. Of SAGE’s boundless variety, it should come as no surprise that Randall pens many of the highlights. Whether he’s toasting to the jaunty ‘Tea Tonight’ or coining one of the great song-titles of 2010 on the front-porch funky ‘5 O’Clock Shadow (Of a Moonbeam)’, Randall digs deep into the far-out vestiges of the 60s to create this psychotropic treasure chest.

As impressive as The Pinecones are collaboratively, half the fun of SAGE lies in its sonic experimentation led by producer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Linklater. Despite the record’s lo-fi techniques, mystic adventures are plentiful on the tripped-out tale of ‘I Am a Mountain’ and in the epilogue flourishes of ‘O Ivy’. If, by the time of final track ‘Four More Days (Til I Open My Music Shoppe)’, it sounds like The Pinecones are slowing down, they’re actually just getting deeper within their own tie-dyed rabbit-hole, swimming in warped organ-tones and squiggly effects. Nothing this fresh can be revivalist fodder and if anything, paradoxically, SAGE often sounds ahead of its time.