The Light Pines Release New Album Into the Light Free Online

There’s just something automatically romantic about the notion of a creative collective. The legends swirling around the academic salons of the Age of Enlightenment, or the impossibly sexy listlessness of Warhol’s Factory, have become nearly as famous as the artistic contributions that emerged from them.

So naturally there has been considerable buzz around Chapel Hill’s own Drughorse Collective - made up of local bands and talented musicians that flit from project to project.  The collective released an EP split of six songs from these projects on Drughorse One back in March with enough noteworthy tracks from Ryan Gustafson, Max Indian, and The Light Pines to back up the buzz.

The Light Pines is a musical project by former Love Language bassist Josh Pope that has been slowly making its way into the forefront of the musical scene in the Triangle over the past few years. The group has maintained an experimental overtone in most of their music that has been exported out of Carrboro. The new album, their second, is no exception. 

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Into The Night by The Light Pines – an album whose free digital download was announced via the band’s Twitter account – sounds like a rough draft by an adept group amidst a promising creative brainstorm.  The narrative feels scattered and the apparent influences range from retro lo-fi, to post-punk, to psychedelic, to new wave dance, to moments of straightforward indie pop.  However, the pervasive tone is moody and dramatic. 

The drama is effectively evoked on the gritty rumbles and soaring synthesizer scales of “Climbing Towards You”, one of the standouts from Drughorse One.  Tracks like “Paradise” and “Riding Waves” take vibrant melodies and smear them with the kind of murky production and rueful lyrics that are indigenious to the sensuality of night time.  There’s even a song called “Creatures Of Night” that opens with the echoing of chords that automatically bring to mind the iconic theatrical intro to “Gangsta’s Paradise”.

In other songs the drama feels like it was carelessly poured on top of too many influences compulsively thrown together.  “Chemicals” sounds like it was written to score some sort of cartoonishly haunted steampunk epic.  And in a release that includes 20 tracks, the song is a reminder of some of the moments that are flavorless and excessive in an album that could be stronger if it were whittled down to it’s boldest convictions. 

The most enticing thing about Into The Night is that it showcases the potential for The Light Pines to make surprisingly powerful dance music.  There is a stirring physicality to tracks like “Pilate” and album highlight, “Blinded”, that could easily be revisited with the vision of layering a bit more percussion and making the kind of rich and sweeping club records that dominate the dance floors of Brooklyn.

If Into The Night has been released as an appetizer for what is to come, then my interest is certainly piqued.  With a little polishing and a bit more focus, The Light Pines could very well end up releasing an album more passionate and popular than even they could have anticipated from this collective. This album builds a lot of excitement for their Hopscotch performance on Saturday September 10th opening for The Flaming Lips and Superchunk in City Plaza.

Download the new album Into the Night by The Light Pines Here.

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Music , Other posts by Whitney Ayres Kenerly.

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Max Indian The Light Pines New Releases The Drughorse Collective

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