Born among the pitch pines of southern New Jersey, Pine Barons is a project that came to fruition as friends gathered around campfires in the nature-rich environments of their hometowns. The band’s beginnings can be traced back to the members getting to know their instruments in their parents’ basements as well as outdoors, adventuring around, exploring an eclectic and intimate palette of punk, jazz and experimental rock.
The band’s debut LP, The Acchin Book (released in 2017), possessed a unique quality from the auxiliary instruments and recording techniques used; feathered paper dragged across paintings, field recordings in the woods at night, accordion, string arrangements and bowed guitars all contributing to the various moods and textures of the record.
Pine Barons’ newest effort, their sophomore album, Mirage on the Meadow, is by nature a more insular effort, as all ten songs were written by frontman and multi-instrumentalist, Keith Abrams, who began to explore themes of feeling like time is running out, longing for love and death’s inevitability. The album is a psychedelic amalgamation of graveyard shifting indie rock – full of the dread we all experience living our daily lives while retaining a cautious optimism that propels its rich, colorful sound towards a brighter future.
Glide is thrilled to premiere “Little Spain” off Mirage on the Meadow, an elastic arena-filling number that expands with the bravado of Arctic Monkeys and the anguished rock keen of Muse. Pine Barons turn ears with their fully realized sound, that sounds years beyond only two albus,
“At the time, I was doing a lot of lyrical experiments like dada, language translations, and rorschach-like picture slideshows. I was skimming through some poetry books to get myself into a lyrical mindset, when after reading Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” I was then led to Ted Hughes’ “To Paint A Water Lily” and so, because the two poets had been married in real life, it led me to the idea of marrying their poems by cutting out each of the words from the pages of the two poems and scattering them on the floor — at first just picking out words without thinking and assembling them at random, then, as it always goes with dada, it starts making complete sense and a subconscious idea begins to crystalize in the chaos,” says Abrams.
