For the past decade, Joe Pernice has
practiced the art of pop chiaroscuro, crafting sunny songs with
sudden shadows and dark songs that dazzle. With its buoyant hooks,
chiming riffs, and major chords, his sad-sack soft pop goes down
easy, but make no mistake: it’s not easy-listening pabulum. These creamy
confections are steeped in bile, larded with regret, and garnished
with ground glass.
Like most of Pernice’s post-Scud
Mountain Boys output, Discover a
Lovelier You conforms to the basic
light/dark, sweet/bitter template, but it offers some interesting
deviations. Compared with the four previous Pernice Brothers
albums, Discover sounds astringent — not exactly stripped-down but
streamlined. Where earlier efforts were awash in swoony strings, Discover gets by mainly
on frigid synths, programmed drums, and reverb-drenched guitars.
Instead of his usual sonic touchstones — the lustrous chamber
rock of Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb — Pernice
seems to have drawn inspiration from the new-wave acts that
influenced him as a teenager in the 1980s: the Smiths, the
Attractions, New Order, and early R.E.M. It’s less of a sea
change than it might appear. This is the ’80s of Morrissey
and Modern English, not the ’80s of Mission of Burma and the
Minutemen. Because his songwriting aesthetic is so deeply
ingrained, Pernice always finds the exact point on his continuum of
influences that dovetails with his own artistic interests. Taken as
a whole, the dozen songs of Discover mark a minor evolution in style, but not one
of them would sound out of place on an earlier Pernice Brothers
album. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.
If Discover isn’t a radical departure, it’s a
highly enjoyable variation, proof that some artists are just plain
good enough that they don’t need to reinvent themselves with every new release. If
you look past its synthetic sheen, relatively minimalist orchestration,
and sometimes-flagrant eightiesisms, Discover is essentially like every other Pernice Brothers album:
Everything rests on the melodies and lyrics and the queasy equilibrium
that Pernice negotiates between them. In this regard, Discover doesn’t
disappoint. The melodies are ripe and satisfying, with just enough
tartness to cut through the treacle; the lyrics are clever and mopey,
in the tradition of Morrissey, if Morrissey had read more James Tate
and less Oscar Wilde. If blues music finds the happiness in being sad,
think of the Pernice Brothers’ music as blues for repressed,
anhedonic blue-staters: exquisite bummers that teeter between despair
and hope, pessimism and optimism, dark and light.
The best songs on Discover, like all the best
songs in Pernice’s catalog, succeed by harnessing these
oppositional energies. “Snow,” a shuddery guitar anthem
reminiscent of the Soft Boys, describes the moments leading up to a
car crash — narrated by a “flickering prick on the
timeline.” With its serrated chords, screamy leads, and
persistent cowbell, it sounds at once dreamily detached and
horrifically present. The ultracatchy “Saddest Quo”
combines Byrdsish guitar jangle with fake violins and a harmonica
straight out of “Moon River”; meanwhile, Pernice croons
lines about a “train wreck picking up survivors from a plane
crash on the TV.” The track you’ll be humming for days,
though, is the delirious duet “Subject Drop,” a
midtempo power-pop rendering of a couple’s pointless quarrel.
Guest singer Blake Hazard’s crisp apple slice of a voice
brings out the best in Pernice’s sweetish, plain one; when
they come together on the chorus, harmonizing in thirds against a
radiant backdrop of guitars, it’s the perfect Pernicean
moment, a giddy balancing act of contrary forces.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2005.
