Pinegrove is neither here nor there. In the three years since the alt-rock group went on hiatus, drummer and founding member Zach Levine permanently left the lineup, frontman Evan Stephens Hall moved to the UK to attend graduate school, and the band wrapped its tour in support of its last album, 11:11. The remaining, mostly rotating, members of Pinegrove have since found new musical homes. It’s unclear whether the group has any touring future or if its cultish following (called Pinenuts, as they once said, sans irreverence) will remain a product of 2016, when shitty tour van YouTube vlogs and political slogan band tees could earnestly get you out of your parents’ basement in Montclair, New Jersey. All that being said, it’s been quite a while since Pinegrove was poised to be the next big thing in indie rock – just as it’s been a while since that cloud of potential hanging over their heads evaporated. So when, after years of radio silence, Elsewhere 3 came out earlier this month, it felt less like a comeback and more like Hall grabbing at the same old faltering string that has defined the latter half of Pinegrove’s career. He seems unsure, that is, of whether to tug a little harder, remain on hiatus, or forever throw it in.
Elsewhere 3 is the third and final installment of Pinegrove’s live album trilogy. Hall announced the LP’s release on Instagram earlier this month, a follow-up to its predecessors released in 2017 and 2020. The 11-song collection, featuring tracks recorded in various cities across the US, forms quicker, country-er arrangements, though still sung by Hall’s same twangy yawps, always in that tenuous falsetto, calling out to whatever he’s currently reading or seeing in the trees outside his window. But this edge that roughens Elsewhere 3 could’ve only come alongside the drag of time passing; the talk of the towners often say if you lock up a novel, or any piece of writing, for instance, in the drawer for months and one day pick it up again, the words probably fail to meet how you’ve changed. It’s a struggle to constantly live in yesteryear, just as it is uninteresting to ponder nostalgia. Hall sings over old lines with an aged voice that’s desperately reaching for newness. As it turns out, there’s not much of it to find.
The album opens with a rollicking version of “Alaska” live in Orlando, where the lyrics are also set. What’s most distinct on “Alaska” and the rest of Elsewhere 3 is not some grave new sonic arrangement, but rather Levine’s drum work, who ends up leading Pinegrove just as much as Hall.
Building off from 11:11, Elsewhere 3 reiterates the former’s message of climate collapse and political corruption, inspired in part by the George Saunders novel “Civilwarland in Bad Decline.” “Swimming,” like on 11:11, is where Elsewhere 3 finds a resolution to the impending doom: Hall, as a child, nearly drowns in the ocean and, in that moment, finds solace in that the only way out of the world’s mess is to stay alive in it. The track’s new, breathier shape features a bigger percussive breakdown following Hall crying out, “I wanna be alive / I wanna live my life out.” Hall wrote that it was the show in Asbury Park, NJ, when the song “found its crest, apparently drawing inspiration from the town where the song’s story takes place. I could feel, as the song built, the salt air blowing through the front doors of the club, swung open with a view of the beach from the stage.”
If there’s any indication of what’s to come from Pinegrove, perhaps it’s laid bare in the album’s only previously unheard song, “Looser.” It doesn’t sound particularly loose at all. There’s forced, wincing rhymes like “telling me I’m a loser / now you see the screen / freaks and geeks is playing on the computer,” making evident that Pinegrove possesses the same confessional, unadorned writing style that so many fans initially fell in love with. Though now at an older age, it’s far less endearing, and hasn’t so much as evolved but become a tired device to muse on color, shape, and the occasional didactic twenty-dollar word.
After the extremely applauded, rose-colored reception of Elsewhere in 2017, Pinegrove would never quite reach the same peaks again, and certainly no critique of any subsequent work would come without a heavy dose of ambivalence. It was in 2018 that it became clear the benevolence of the once-dubbed “humanitarian” band had been malfunctioning all along, or as Jenn Pelly wrote on behalf of so many women, that it is always an invariably bad idea “to put that much faith in a male public figure, even if his songs have saved you.” Those words – directed at fans and journalists alike – came after Hall was accused of “sexual coercion” in 2017; he then mounted a complicated and frustrating comeback about a year later, ultimately releasing five records after the fact while still maintaining most of his previously honed indie-stardom. But still, Pinegrove’s reputation and musical prowess never managed to reach the same level of infatuation that resulted from its 2016 hit debut Cardinal. Pinegrove would probably tell you that its good old days ended just barely after they started nine years ago – there’s been success with each released LP after the fact, but on the whole, what they had blazed and went out.
Should Pinegrove have been given the grace to stunt a new return? Probably not now, definitely not in 2018. Eight years after Elsewhere’s inception, perhaps it’s safe to say that the most favorable part of the group finalizing the triptych is not for the sake of repurposing music, nor for the fans, but rather, where they’ve decided to put their money. Elsewhere 3 is only available on Bandcamp, like Elsewhere and Elsewhere 2, and 100% of the profits go to supporting Palestinians living under genocide and apartheid. The money reaped from album sales is divided between Medical Aid for Palestinians and Oxfam. Earlier this month, Pinegrove also became one of more than 1,000 bands to geo-block Israel, signing onto No Music For Genocide, a pact that vows to remove all music from streaming services from the country.
Hall hints at another potential project in a newsletter: “There’s even more yet that I WISH I could say but it wouldn’t be prudent, the time is not yet ripe, that is, right, but rest assured that it is ripening.” Whether Hall decides to release another Pinegrove album is besides the point – the fact of the matter is that eight years after the band initially stepped out of the public eye, there hasn’t again been the same concern for how, or why, even, the same band keeps attempting to stunt another return. In a post-Me Too world, it seems that penance – especially as it pertains to male musicians – is rather transient.
For more experienced Pinegrove listeners, it goes without saying that Hall does, indeed, sing somewhat incessantly with a scrutinizing lens of himself, especially on Elsewhere 3. He’s made an effort in his lyrics to directly and candidly address his past, whether it be genuine or just another mock-up of publicized male sincerity (though the surface levelness of some Pinegrove lyrics feels more like checked boxes on therapy homework rather than the work of real reflection, pointing more toward the latter assumption). On “Alcove,” he sings with gusto, “I’ll go if you want,” on “Let,” there’s the dragging-his-feet repetition of “I let you down today” and how he so desperately “wants to let these years away,” and, on “Respirate,” he’s “having a hard time finding a good way out.” He wants us to forgive him, maybe, or at the very least recognize that he’s too in pain.
We don’t listen to music to glean a moral compass; we should look even less towards musicians to provide one. Like the rest of us, Hall uses songs as an anchor in times of personal reckoning, a way to better feel his feet on the ground, and not necessarily to unlock a box of emotional clarity or pave some decent path to self-acceptance. A song, an album, or a whole band’s discography might be better understood as a cramped view into something much more stark – like a chasmed mirror reflecting pain and harm and love and trauma and literature and joy all at once, and all in just one image thrown at you before your eyes. What will forever be up to the listener is choosing to accept or believe what you see once you really look.