June, 2010

The Pines to Play Storyhill Fest West - July 16th & 17th - Bozeman, MT

For tickets, directions, and scheduling information, please go to www.storyhillfest.com

The Pines at Winnipeg Folk Festival

Winnipeg Folk Festival Schedule Announced:

The Pines will perform at the Winnipeg Folk Festival on Friday, July 9th @ 1:00pm at the Big Bluestem Stage and two workshops on Sunday, July 11th; 11:00am at Bur Oak Stage with Pieta Brown and Bo Ramsey, and 2:45pm at Bur Oak with Hot Tuna and Gregory Alan Isakov. Check http://www.winnipegfolkfestival.ca/wp/festival/schedules/ for details

April, 2010

Tickets are selling fast for The Pines at The Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, MN on Friday, April 23rd @8:00pm. Acclaimed indie-folk song-smith Ben Weaver opens. Get yours today at http://www.thecedar.org/events/2010/04/23/pines-ben-weaver

March, 2010

The Pines will perform at An Evening of the Odds, an opening by the acclaimed Twin Cities artist Jon Reischl on Saturday, March 6th. The opening starts at 7:00pm; The Pines perform at 9:00pm

Tickets are now available for The Pines upcoming show at The Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, MN on Friday, April 23rd. Click here to buy tickets.

February, 2010

The Pines will perform an official showcase at South By South West Music Festival in Austin, TX March 17th-21st; check tour dates page for upcoming details

punk rock skunk blog

February 9, 2010

Cafe Carpe Show Review

The Pines On Wisconsin Public Television

January 26, 2010

The Pines perform in Wisconsin Public Television 30-Minute Music Hour

CITY PAGES

December 17, 2009

http://www.citypages.com/2009-12-16/news/the-year-in-music-the-best-albums-of-2009/

The Onion AV Club Best of 2009

December 17, 2009

Country Music Television!

December 17, 2009

The Pines, “Tremolo,” placed in the top 10 notable independent records of 2009!

(Red House)
By Steve Leftridge

With The Pines, the sun never shines, and you shiver when the cold wind blows. Or so it feels when listening this alt-folk duo’s remarkable new album, Tremolo. The group, led by singers-guitarists David Huckfelt and Benson Ramsey, captures a spectral single effect throughout, evoking an otherworldly landscape of fallen moons and dead valleys, campfires and ghost towns, meadows of dawn and broken dreams. These Minneapolis-via-Iowa boys pick delicate, spare acoustic guitars wrapped in glass-slide reverberations and gentle, haunting organ embellishments on these ten scorched-earth songs.

Tremolo, produced by Ramsey’s father and Greg Brown sideman, Bo Ramsey, borrows Daniel Lanois’ Time Out of Mind treatment, lacing everything with a gleaming echo. Both singers whisper their vocals for the most part, and they’re hard to tell apart. Ramsey is the most effective singer, probably because he sounds like he’s barely trying, while Huckfelt has a distracting, rapid quiver in his voice that doesn’t serve his songs particularly well. But both play and sing with singular uniformity, providing an elegant cohesive structure to this seductive record.

While the album works in musical miniature—just a slight organ run here, a little electric guitar embroidery there—the lyrics spread much further. It’s mostly dreary stuff about foreboding signs and characters who have plenty to cry about. But as 19th-century as The Pines are, with their gutbucket instrumentation and O Brother, Where Art Thou? clothing, the songs apply easily to the here and now, taking on the spiritual crisis of hard times in arresting metaphorical verse: “Who hung the moon so low in the sky?/It taps its feet \‘round my bedside and/It breaks the locks on all my dreams”. And on “Meadows of Dawn” they hit harder, ruminating on the toll of recent years: “The counter-intelligence was wrong tonight/More has been lost here than songs tonight/Oh the heart is a cage in this perilous age/And I’m quite sure the lanterns will dim tonight”.

The controlling motif on Tremolo is the moon, fitting for this album’s midnight meditations. It’s as if they dared each other to work a reference to the moon into every song on the album, which they did but for the sole cover, a reworking of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues”. The moon serves as an apocalyptic harbinger in these songs, which evoke either the scrabble of the past or barren lands of a wasted future. “The night owls howl and feed until dawn,” Huckfelt sings on “Shine on Moon”, “I turn my collar from the right to the wrong”. It’s a song of hopeless alienation and latent violence, set when late night becomes indistinguishable from early morning and there’s nothing left to lose. Elsewhere, the endtime angst in the lyrics is more straightforward: “We talk about the end of the world/As we go walking at night”, sings Ramsey on the album-ending “Shiny Shoes”.

Things aren’t all entirely gloomy. Perhaps the record’s best song is “Heart and Bones”, about a dream of love come true, with a traditional folk repetition backed by brushstrokes that work up to a slow canter. But even a love song has a touch of the macabre—instead of “roses are red”, it’s blood, and love comes in the time of dying, “when the apples fall.” These are patient songs, with Delta blues drifts, and one of the loveliest moments is the gorgeous “Avenue of the Saints”, the album’s lone instrumental, a lonely melody of intertwining fingerpicked guitar, a slow melody line, and shimmering brushed percussion. Echoes of that melody are picked up again in “Shiny Shoes”, and the record ends with a blend of hope and resignation (“We surrender, just to survive”), minor-key gloom and floating release. Yes, Tremolo is a beauty, but it’s the kind that should serve as your soundtrack to the witching season

Tremolo Reviewed @ Elsewhere

November 30, 2009

The Pines: Tremolo (Red House/Southbound)

Quite why the Pines — who are Benson, the son of the legendary singer-songwriter Bo Ramsey, and David Huckfelt — didn’t get more alt.country/indie.rock traction with their excellent Sparrows in the Bell album was a mystery to me.
To me they sounded like a bridge between cryptic Seventies Dylan and alt.counry/folk blues world of Bonnie Prince Billy/Bill Callahan/the Felice Brothers et al.
That good opinion is confirmed by this low-key but crafted album which keeps the guitars low, the roots rhythms lightly rocking and the vocals intelligent and in your ear.
Their cover of Spider John Koener’s Skipper and His Wife is so understarted and hypnotic you can’t help but be drawn in.
But their original material — again this is co-produced by Bo who contributes stellar guitar also — has a musical and emotional clarity which is rare in this world: Spike Driver Blues possesses an urgency which belies its smooth surface and refers back to John Henry, that steel driving man; yet Behind the Time which follows is one of those songs which suggests flawed but honest love — and that’s hard to resist if you’ve eventually become an adult through similarly redemptive relationships.
Or maybe it’s not about that at all — and that too is their gift.
Said it before, will say it again: the Pines sound convincingly wise beyond their years.

Exceptional.

A Truer Sound “Tremolo” Review!

November 24, 2009

The Pines – Tremolo
Man this album is fantastic. Full of bluesy folky goodness and some of the finest yet most subtle slide guitar ever laid to wax. The Pines are one part songwriter David Huckfelt, and one part songwriter Benson Ramsey, who is the son of Greg Brown sideman and producer Bo Ramsey (who also produced this album). I’m guessing that’s where he gets his killer guitar chops. This is their second album, and shows a band that has matured quite a bit since their debut album. While that album was a good listen, I would call this album a MUST listen. Great songwriting, great playing, great production, just an all around great album. I tell you what it kind of reminds me of…..if Gurf Morlix had produced a mid 70’s Bob Dylan album.

St.Cloud Times

November 5, 2009

The Pines find their sound amid the silence

http://www.sctimes.com/article/20091105/ENT/111050036/The-Pines-find-their-sound-amid-the-silence

The Onion Interview by Jake Mohan

October 23, 2009

The Pines embrace a wide-open, small-town aesthetic

By Jake Mohan October 23, 2009

Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt both grew up in the middle of Iowa’s folk-music scene, but they didn’t meet until they’d both moved to Tucson, Arizona as a way to find their own artistic path as The Pines. After moving back to the Midwest, the pair worked with some of the region’s most notable folk and country musicians (including Benson’s father, guitarist Bo Ramsey) and has released three albums of finely wrought folk music strongly evocative of their Midwestern milieu. The new Tremolo is a mature evolution beyond their previous efforts, with the duo supported by a combo of seasoned local musicians. The soft rusticity of country ballads like “Heart & Bones” shares space with the haunting ambiguity of “Pray Tell” and the bluesy, dissonant “Shine On Moon,” cementing the impression that the Pines have truly arrived on the Twin Cities roots scene. On the eve of the Pines’ release show for Tremolo at the Cedar Cultural Center on Saturday, The A.V. Club talked with Ramsey and Huckfelt about the new album, the allure of small Midwestern towns, and why it’s important to be unknown (at first, anyway).

AVC: How important was Tucson to you as a formative experience? And why choose Tucson?

Benson Ramsey: Tucson was amazing, man. It was a lot of artists from all over the place. And it’s isolated. We were trying everything. Just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, with full force. It was serious.

David Huckfelt: It was a great feeling to go to a town you’d never been to, and nobody knew who we were.

BR: [In Iowa] I was playing with Pieta Brown [daughter of folk musician Greg Brown]. We’d book a show and try everything in our power to get them to not mention our fathers. But we’d go and try out these new songs, and the room would be packed, and it just didn’t feel right. Pieta’s the one who steered me toward Tucson. … It’s great, because you can’t make any money. So everyone’s just doing it because they truly love it.

DH: Everybody pitches in and plays with each other, shares show and shares stages. Very loose. It wasn’t like you had a 25-minute opening slot; you could play music all night long.

BR: I haven’t really come across that here. Like, “My friend Rob just got out of prison. Can he play bass with you tonight?” “Yeah, man, I guess.” [Laughs.]

AVC: How did you decide to relocate to Minneapolis?

BR: We came back to what we knew, after we’d had some time away to learn the craft a little bit better. It was always the goal to make a record for Trailer Records, out of Iowa City. [The band is now sign to Minneapolis label Red House.] We missed the change of seasons.

DH: And just that feeling that times had changed, and there’s not that one place: You don’t go to New York anymore if you want to be a folkie, or L.A. if to be a rocker. To go someplace and be open to new experiences, Minneapolis was as good a place, or better, as any.

AVC: Do you think there’s a distinguishable difference between the music you made in Tucson and the music you make here?

BR: There has to be. Weather, and traffic, and landscape—all that stuff seeps into you.

DH: And the spaciousness of the Midwest. We do travel a lot, and some of the places we play are smaller towns. So we’re out on the back roads a lot in places that are wide-open. And farms, and places that are way past their heyday, which is sad to see, sometimes.

AVC: Your shows this fall take you to a lot of small towns, rather than rock clubs in bigger cities. Was that a deliberate choice?

BR: We like the space, and the people. They come out, and you can park wherever you want for free. We’re sort of weaning ourselves off the [Twin Cities]. We’ve already relocated.

DH: We have a place down in Iowa, a little town called Moonrise, were we wrote a lot of this new record. To write out of that place, and to play those small towns, those are some of the only places you can go that have strong senses of community anymore. The level of human contact is much higher than you find in a lot of cities, where people don’t get out of their cars and interact with one another. It doesn’t take hardly anything for people’s lives to be so full and so busy that they don’t have much freedom. When you go down to a place like Moonrise, you don’t know what’s going to come up out of your consciousness that would be stifled if you were in the city.

AVC: Tremolo is your most sophisticated album yet, both in terms of instrumentation and contributors. How did that progression evolve?

DH: The songs tell you what to do. It wasn’t a conscious decision so much as we could hear these songs being recorded in a certain way.

BR: We leave a lot of it open. We hear a certain instrument and then have our friends come in and play how they play.

DH: I think that’s why those jazz guys [drummer J.T. Bates and bassist James Buckley] like to play with us: we just let them do their thing. They just get to feel the music. There’s no conscious progression where each record’s going to be bigger, but just what’s exciting to us at the moment

City Pages Q&A

October 22, 2009

http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2009/10/pines.php

Penguin eggs review

October 14, 2009

The Pines
Tremolo
(Red House Records)

Potent, poignant, minimalist country from Iowans David Huckfelt and Benson Ramsey (son of Greg Brown sideman Bo, who produced this record). The duo spin spare, haunting melodies and imagistic words over deceptively gentle intertwinings of acoustic and electric guitar, stand-up bass, keys and drums.

But song after song, with soft, wearied voices, they reveal a lyrical world view both thoughtful and tough, keenly attuned to harsh realities and the glimpses of consolation that peek through the solitude and loss inherent in life. “We surrender, just to survive/ But no matter how hard you try/ No, you can’t put the tears/ Back into your eyes,” Ramsey sings (with the help of his dad) on Shiny Shoes. What’s remarkable is how such an unsentimental outlook is married to music at once so fragile, so gravid and, ultimately, beautiful. If I were a betting man, I’d say watch for this album on a lot of critics’ top 10 lists for 2009.

– By Scott Lingley

Daily Local News in Philly

October 1, 2009

http://www.dailylocal.com/articles/2009/09/25/entertainment/srv0000006465854.txt

The Pines

Tremolo

Red House

David Huckfelt and Benson Ramsey — the edgy alt-folk duo The Pines — return with “Tremolo,” the follow-up to 2007’s internationally acclaimed “Sparrows in the Bell.”

Where” Sparrows” was the calm before the storm, “Tremolo” parts the clouds and lets the sun sneak in. With alluring acoustic melodies, gritty electric guitars and refined songwriting, Huckfelt and Ramsey have created a modern roots masterpiece.

Recorded in only two days and produced by acclaimed producer Bo Ramsey, “Tremolo” has all the elements of a classic. Eloquent lyrics that are carried by two distinct voices coalesce in a unique

blend of indie-rock, folk and blues. The grooves are textured and atmospheric, while sparse arrangements construct a musical landscape that can make you feel happy and sad almost simultaneously.

From the driving opener, “Pray Tell,” the haunting title track, “Lonesome Tremolo Blues,” and the mournfully beautiful closing track, “Shiny Shoes,” this is an album that can descend through every corner of human emotion while leading the listener to the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Pines on KAXE, Grand Rapids, MN

September 30, 2009

Tremolo Review on Rambles

September 22, 2009

The Pines,
Tremolo
(Red House, 2009)

What emerges is something between roots-rock and roots-folk, in a more acoustic alternative to the approach Dylan has taken in his late career — for a particularly vivid instance, consider “Shine On, Moon” — without ever falling quite into anything like mindless Dylan echo-mongering. That’s probably because The Pines listen to the people Dylan listens to, as opposed to — the more typical practice — just Dylan. The Pines’ songs, like Dylan’s, are full of well-chosen quotes from old folk songs, Woody Guthrie and even literary poetry (in “Moon,” W.B. Yeats’s “The Stolen Child”).

Though The Pines, who are Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt, are youngish, their songs have deeper resonance than one — or at least I — would have anticipated. The CD is brilliantly co-produced by Bo Ramsey (Benson’s dad) and the band, with some of the Twin Cities’ finest rock musicians providing tasteful settings. There’s not a lot of rocking-out here; rather, the sound is mostly restrained, even pensive, rolling along largely at mid-tempo.

The two covers make for particular delight. In my listening experience, Mississippi John Hurt’s versions of songs are so perfectly whole in themselves that covers usually can aspire only to redundancy, the alternative being embarrassment. On the other hand, Lucinda Williams’ reading of “Angels Laid Him Away” (Hurt called it “Louis Collins”) is so raw and true that it’ll have you reeling. (It’s on the 2001 Vanguard tribute disc Avalon Blues.) Williams did it by forgetting Hurt’s arrangement and making up her own as if she’d picked the song out of the air. The Pines do the same with Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues” (a “John Henry” variant) to splendid effect. There is also a moving and memorable version of “The Skipper & His Wife,” written by Minneapolis’ legendary Spider John Koerner.

Over the decades the Twin Cities folk scene has produced such notable figures as Dylan, Koerner, Ray & Glover, Leo Kottke, Dakota Dave Hull and more. The Pines are honorable carriers not only of the larger American folk tradition but of an esteemed local one as well. The music sings through The Pines.

The Pines in Rolling Stone!

Senior writer David Fricke reviews "Tremolo" in this month's "Fricke's Picks"

Fricke’s Picks: The Pines’ Stark Country

10/9/09, 10:28 am EST

The Pines — stark-country singer-songwriters Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt — have a thing for speed: They recorded their fine new album, Tremolo (Red House), in two days, half the time it took them to cut 2007’s Sparrows in the Bell. But there is no undue haste in Tremolo’s quietly gripping tension. A state of emergency runs through these songs (like “the turnstile of greed and fear” in “Pray Tell”), but there is safe haven too, even if it’s just a dream of love in “Shiny Shoes,” and the Pines get there with a warm, drawling poise in their voices and spare, resonant picking.

Watch The Pines Live in The Current Studios:

"Pray Tell" - Live The Current Studio

Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Roberts interviewed The Pines for their new release "Tremolo" on "All Things Considered"; check out the complete piece here

Pines sat down with Pam from KFAI's "Pam Without Boundaries" for an interview and live performance of new songs from "Tremolo"; check it out here