Cardinal

Say what it is... Its so impossible... Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall drawls on the album’s highlight track. The line’s meant as an examination of language’s intrinsic hardships, but it’s also an apt description of the record itself. Adopting genres and influences at will, *Cardinal* unfolds through lo-fi indie shouts, country twang, and chunky-riffed pop rock choruses. Each turn of phrase, guitar tone, and harmony feels delightfully stripped-down, comfortably unrushed, and well-lived-in.

Montclair, N.J. band Pinegrove's debut LP Cardinal recalls some of the most consistently likeable rock bands of the past 20 years in their most easygoing phases: There’s the rootsy shamble of early Wilco, the wiggly guitar solos and general guilelessness of pre-prog Built to Spill. But beneath the amiable surface is an intense work about one of the most important things imaginable: how to make our friendships really matter.

Pinegrove bring a philosophical take to life’s big questions. And they somehow make the world feel smaller and more conquerable.

Cardinal, the label debut by Montclair, New Jersey's Pinegrove, is an album redolent with long-nurtured disappointment and world-weariness that somehow manages to rise up and succeed in spite of itself.

The emotionally charged Cardinal begins with wistful twang and the all-too-common existential dilemma of the young-but-swiftly-aging: the falling away of a past that was once forever.