Music

Pernice from Now On

The Effortless Classicism of Joe Pernice

by Sean Nelson

Joe Pernice is the owner of a musical monkey's paw, a gift most songwriters would covet, but one that carries the capacity to bring its bearer as much frustration as joy. Pernice's incredible talent, never more evident than on the Pernice Brothers' latest record, The World Won't End, is this: Damn near every song he writes (or at least nearly every one he releases) is a stone classic. Pernice has an uncanny ability to craft perfect songs, songs that adhere to the structural, melodic, and lyrical conventions of pop music--as defined by the stylistic span between "Here, There, and Everywhere"-era McCartney and Big Star's Radio City, via the Zombies' Odyssey and Oracle--but that ring with timeless originality. So what's the problem? Actually, there kind of isn't one, especially if you're a listener.

The World Won't End, like its Pernice Bros. predecessor, 1998's Overcome by Happiness, and the self-titled one-off side projects Chappaquiddick Skyline and Big Tobacco, is stocked with song after sweet sad song for the ages. World is also a triumph of production, besting the first-pass lushness of Overcome and the super-casual, at-home vibe of the side projects. Vaguely retro (like the classic Lilys LP Better Can't Make Your Life Better, though without the overt Kinkiness), the new record makes with the soft anthems straight away, leading with "Working Girls (Sunlight Shines)," a buoyant, bouncy paean to women of the hourly wage, who feel mocked by the radio, and must assert their sad existence ("contemplating suicide or a graduate degree") with bathroom graffiti. Sung in Pernice's breathy tenor over a musical bed of tastefully soaring strings and persistent tambourine, "Working Girls" sounds on first listen like the kind of song you've known by heart for your whole life.

One song later ("7:30") and you find the band--which includes former and current members of Lilys, New Radiant Storm King, Jale, the Sadies, and others--engaged in a Fifth Dimension/Association-esque ba-ba-ba volley that lifts the end of the song from jaunty elegy to utter pop splendor. "She Heightened Everything," with its resounding chorus, "I can't believe in love, and I want to believe," is, by any fair measure, the best song on the album, the rightful climax to a cycle about broken love--but it pops up at number four here.

As it is, "The Ballad of Bjorn Borg" (placed third to last) stands as the mellow peak of this eminently mellow record. Pernice climbs to the pop summit only to announce, bleakly, balefully, beautifully, that "we killed the endless summer."

That deftly rung death knell for one of pop's most enduring clichés is a good illustration of where Pernice seems to be coming from lyrically--working as he does within such familiar territory, he's forever drawing imaginary lines in the dirt of dead romance, then stepping right over them, crossing back, ever returning to the scene of the crime. "There's a box I still can't open," he sings in "Our Time Has Passed," "There's a name that hurts to say/I fall in love with the way I'm shaking." As the album ends, however, in the ukulele hush of "Cronulla Breakdown" he's admitting an even sadder truth: "I try to shake you, but I don't really feel like shaking."

So, what's all this about a monkey's paw, then? Aside from the obvious sting of good heartbreak pop (and Pernice, for all his sentiment, is hardly a sentimentalist--as with any great craftsman, you can tell that the making of the songs is the very act of dealing with whatever emotions inspired them), what ill could possibly come from Pernice's seemingly limitless capacity? Well, only this: the curse of expectation. For Pernice's old band, the Scud Mountain Boys, New England Yankees who made three classic albums of trad-ish country (Massachusetts is forever), expectation became a real burden. Once they reached the end of their stylistic tether and Pernice wanted to move on into the realm of pop (a natural evolution from country), he was hounded by the continuous assumption of country (a.k.a. "new-," "alt-," or "insurgent-" country) leanings by humans and critics alike. This effect--the shadow of the past--has tamped down hard on the potential of each of his subsequent albums (up to, but hopefully not including The World Won't End), enough that Pernice has started his own label, the better to navigate future misapprehensions of his work.

In the end, of course, you could do much worse. It's hardly the end of the world, after all.

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