By Berlinda Recacho
The songs of Pernice Brothers branch out in their own all encompassing impressive diagrams like a scene in Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch in which Elisabeth Moss stands proudly, even defiantly, in front of an enormous blackboard having diagrammed a sentence of equally awesome reach, with subjects, predicates, adjectives, nouns, verbs and adverbs, conjunctions all in their place. The group, which includes a pair of namesake brothers (frontman Joe and guitarist Bob) employ the elements of pleasing chord progressions, proficient timing, sonorous vocals, and clever lyrics that get the better of you. It might be said that their music diagrams the listener, expertly tagging and labeling the impulses of emotion and experience.
The group reminds you that your heart is a muscle the size and shape of a fist, but you simultaneously realize that said heart is defenseless against the punch of a Joe Pernice-penned lyrical hook. The oaky timbre of age has slightly deepened and thinned his voice, but it is still limber and lithe enough to lull listeners with a lovely tune as words turn them emotionally inside out. I don't typically like sad songs, but I am magnetized to the cheerful melancholy that is a hallmark of the Pernice brand. If he were a writer, he would be a poetic realist. But wait, he actually is the author of the 33-and-a-Third series Meat is Murder by The Smiths (envisioned as a coming-of-age novella) and a comi-tragic novel entitled It Feels So Go When I Stop (the punchline to a joke that asks, “Why do I keep hitting myself in the head with a hammer?”). Who Will You Believe, the first new Pernice Brothers album since 2019's Spread The Feeling is a collection of sadly funny, cleverly obtuse, and joyfully sorrowful songs. Songwriter Joe's likely musical inspirations are also enigmatic. Morrissey and Marr, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Alex Chilton, Todd Rundgren, Marshall Crenshaw, Andy Partridge (fun fact: pernice translated from Italian is "partridge") are all masters of conundrum and contradiction, creators of bright jangly tunes cut through with self-effacing truths, or soul-searching compositions that chart the depths of internal murkiness.
Pernice has a talent for finding the unnaturally greener grass on the other side of pessimism. The glass is half empty, sure, but it rings a lovely tone when you tap it with a spoon before making that existential toast that will leave most of the guests befuddled, but be vivid enough to keep as a memory when all other details have faded away. I don't completely trust Pernice when he's cheery and upbeat as there's always a double-entendre, a counterpoint to the point. He starts the album with its title track, singing with melodic conviction, "I fell in love with the possible world/And then I smashed my heart against a stone." In "She's A Man of Means", Pernice informs us about the assertive, practical woman in his life. Anybody else might be making fun, but he's stating a fact, ceding the seat of power and giving credit to his better half. "Hey, Guitar" is a rousing electric confrontation between musician and instrument in the way that a song can take the wind like a kite and go where it wants to go, regardless of how hard you try to control it. "Look Alive" is irresistible catchy pop that bemoans the unromantic vagaries of aging, a bitter pill hidden in a confection.
"And if my screw won't snug, well you can roll my soul up in a throw rug
At best a shaky maybe
Strumming the old banjo baby
Snuffing out a torch that was held for me
I wish I could sing that song. The one that makes the ordinary extraordinaire."
If the uptempo songs are fascinating studies in contradictions, Pernice Brothers are truly in their element when performing ballads. There's nothing to fight against as those tunes become one with their mood. "Not This Pig" opens in the classic Pernice way, strumming into an immersive half-measure of all cylinders firing before the singing starts, striving to make the minor tune hummable with a Beatles-inspired sensibility:
"Once an undiscovered star
You're just another clown crammed in a tiny car
It's so embarrassing to see you now
It's so embarrassing to see you now."
This storyteller knows the geometry of hitting both the pleasure centers and the memory triggers in our brains. Even when he was younger, Pernice was always so convincing in conveying his folly, putting a voice to the music of regret. Now that he is older, having lived more of life, he is able to put events in a bigger perspective. He taps into the vein of experience delicately but effectively, like an expert phlebotomist. "December in Her Eyes" is steeped in the surprisingly complex easy listening hits of the radio of the Seventies, foreshadowing the eleventh hour of a relationship in the twelfth month. The mournful "What We Had" takes the love story past its ending, as always tongue-in-cheek: "I can see the way it's playing out/it's a comedy of errors/But it's sad." The mostly instrumental theme "Song for Sir Robert Helpmann" sent me running to Google to learn that the subject was a preeminent Australian ballet dancer who also performed in Powell & Pressburger's classic films The Red Shoes (1948) and Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and played the deeply creepy Childcatcher in the movie musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). "Don't Need That Anymore", a duet with Neko Case of The New Pornographers, calls out the flaws of a relationship in a he said/she said manner: "Oh you could soothe me like a long cool water/Now I'm more thirsty than before" and "It's a fool who'll tell you love is simple/And less is almost always more." With the stark honesty of a country song, it is hilarious in one light and tragic from another angle. These two have made an educated decision, almost clinical, weighing their inconsistencies and codependencies and realizing that their time is past. "Ordinary Goldmine" does the opposite: chronicling an embarrassment of riches, an inventory of talents and advantages that seem like they are standard issue. Its minimal arrangement calls to mind Big Star's "Thirteen", cutting to the quick of longing and regret.
Pernice is willing to not only explore the inner personal landscape, but also the social fabric that holds us together. The last two songs are meant to be unsettling. "How Will We Sleep?" is like one of those vaguely threatening folk lullabies that soothe and frighten at the same time with falling cradles and farmer's wives with carving knives, only these fears cannot be pushed off as absurd or escaped by waking up. "The Purple Rain" is a stripped-down response to the fervently railing "Saddest Quo" (from 2016's "Discover a Lovelier You"). The earlier song's "Train wreck/picking up survivors from a plane crash/on the TV Live" has expanded over 18 years into the full deconstruction of a patriotic anthem:
"Here's a man one heartbeat from a ghost
Here's a vein, it spiders coast to coast
One thousand quiet cuts and I do believe we're close
Been bleeding out for years and years and years"
Yes, the situation is dire; but there's a glimmer of hope in the airing of this grievance, particularly in song. The word saudade describes a sort of perpetual state of longing, an acceptance, even celebration of melancholy for melancholy's sake. Pernice Brothers inhabit this feeling and make it their lodestone. The questions asked are rhetorical, not meant to be answered directly, but to create another branch on the path of trying to understand life and where it takes you.
Who Will You Believe by Pernice Brothers is out now. Details below.
[Photo: Colleen Nicholson]