We'll get to the book in a moment. The new Pernice Brothers CD, "Goodbye, Killer" drops June 15 and it's another gorgeous set of melodic rock and pop. Sunny on the surface, mordant underneath, always erudite: it's impossible to mistake Joe Pernice's voice and lyrics for anyone else's. When was the last time you heard an album that namechecks Ford Madox Ford and Leni Riefenstahl? My favorites are the jaunty title track and chiming rockers "Something For You" and "Fucking and Flowers." The anthemic "The Great Depression" is irresistibly catchy, although it's either about an actual depression or the worst girlfriend ever.
Once in a while Pernice gets too cute by half - a spoiled "Bechamel" as romantic metaphor - but that's kind of a trademark, actually. You have to go too far regularly to get to a classic like, "I'd kiss your ass to kiss your ass again" (in the twangy, broken-hearted "Newport News"). Pernice sings the same way - occasionally there's a falsetto note he can't quite hold, as on the refrains in "The Great Depression," but somehow that too makes it all work.
My previous favorite Pernice disc was "Discover A Lovelier You," which for all its varied sounds seemed to be of a single dreamy mood. "Goodbye, Killer" reminds me more of "Revolver," which I've also been listening to a lot since I got the Beatles box - a collection of disparate songs held together by the voices and guitar sounds. Love the guitar work all over the place by Pernice and James Walbourne (also of the Pretenders), especially the electrics on the throbbing "Jacqueline Susann" and the slide on the title track, which sounds like it dropped off a Rod Stewart album circa "Gasoline Alley."
(Photo: Pernice, center, with bandmates Ric Menck and Walbourne. Not shown: Bob Pernice, known as "Other Pernice." Pic by Mike Ritter.)
Referencing other artists is a rock critic's crutch of course. But Pernice keeps reminding me of Elvis Costello, and not just because of the glasses and (sometimes) beard, or the way he can go from the new wave of "Jacqueline Susann" to the bucolic country of "We Love The Stage." It's the way he produces pretty sounds that seem to curdle when you hear what he's actually saying. Like Costello, Pernice seems to enjoy coming off as a misanthrope. And like Costello, you get the sense that all the bristly wordplay is a romantic's defense mechanism, and once or twice an album the armor drops. Anyone who protests so eloquently that he's not "The Loving Kind" probably doth protest too much.
But then again.
Let us now consider "Pernice To Me," the paperback released simultaneously with the CD.
The slim volume comes from Ashmont Books, the publishing arm of Dorchester's Ashmont Records, both of which are basically Pernice and the one-woman conglomerate known as Boston publicist Joyce Linehan, who also serves as Pernice's manager. "Pernice To Me" - which I and other Linehan fans have been demanding for many months - recounts the communications between the pair, documented over time by Linehan via the @ashmont twitter account. They share the author credit.
Example:"Pernice to Me: We're touring in YOUR car? All I can say is, that piece-of-shit lezmobile better not break down. And I'm driving." (A footnote in the book explains that Linehan does drive a Subaru, although she is not a lesbian.)
No less an authority than critic Robert Christgau says that the book is a kind of music journalism, offering "little glimpses into the highly unglamorous life of an indie-rock lifer." Christgau seems to think it's the life that's given Pernice the nasty mouth. I don't know Pernice, but I have to figure it's part performance, a way of amusing himself via the caricature of an infantile, egomaniacal, misogynistic, utterly self-centered artist. Because if it was all for real, Linehan would have (justifiably) killed him by now.
"Pernice to me: People keep saying I'm a curmudgeon. It's like you invented this character. Tweet that."
It's a hilarious postmodern Punch and Judy act. And give Linehan credit: the twitter stream preceded @shitmydadsays by months, and that's now going to be a sitcom starring William Shatner as dad. What delicious irony it would be if Pernice's indie-rock life was glammed up by a "Shit My Rock Star Says" sitcom based on "Pernice to Me." Maybe if Costello isn't too busy with his talk show...
