As the story goes, the Athens, GA-based quartet Pinecones has been more than a decade in the works, as each of the band’s members, Bo Orr (vocals, guitar), Ben Salle (drums), Brain Atoms (guitar) and Ryan Evers, have played in a number of bands together, going back to when they were all high schoolers. Their earliest band together, Mosaic, never settled on one particular style – in fact, the band prided itself on exploration of their mutual music interests and learning how to actually write songs. When Orr moved to New England, the quartet continued to work on music together, while Orr had began focusing on the grindcore band Dead in the Dirt and Atoms was in punk band, Crater. But during a breakfast in 2012, Atoms introduced a thought he had been playing with for some time time: “What if they started a band called Pinecones that was influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman?”

Soon after Atoms and Salle had started working on demos, that Orr has described as as sounding like “some weird CCR deep cut.” Orr insisted that he should write over their instrumentals and their new collaboration began in earnest. Perhaps because of their years of collaborating and their mutual love of guitar rock, which included the likes of Lungfish, Fugazi, The Allman Brothers, Patti Smith Group, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, they didn’t have the standard band conversations regarding how they should sound or what they were attempting to do, they just went about and did it. 

And after a year of playing shows and writing songs, the member of Pinecones went into the studio last April Fool’s Day to record the material that would wind up comprising their forthcoming debut effort, Sings For You Now. Coincidentally (or should I just say symbolically?), the band returned to the studio to record overdubs on Good Friday. The album’s latest single “Cosmosis” is primal, raw and absolutely urgent rock that eschews the familiar “verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus” structure for a sense of wild, improvisation – dense frenzied ideas from layers of chugging guitar lines are built upon, repeated, altered and held together by Salle’s drumming while lyrics are shouted and howled as though Orr was trying to peel paint off the walls.  And then the song quietly ends, capturing the furious and quick burst of passion and energy that our lives actually are before it dissipates into the ether. Rock with such unbridled passion is sadly kind of rare these days but, man, is it invigorating and necessary.