Joe Pernice sure is miserable. And I don't mean just a little sad or having an off day-- the guy is flat-out depressed, waiting for his life to end. At least this is the impression I get from listening to his records. This is the guy who once opened an album by intoning "I hate my life" over a dirge-like pop arrangement.
Perhaps he's not actually that miserable and it's just his flair for melodrama that makes his situation seem so dire. On "Our Time Has Passed," he describes breaking up with his girlfriend, comparing it to "a flash of radiation that leaves the buildings where they stand." Pernice fills 11 songs with exactly this kind of sentiment on his second outing with the Pernice Brothers, the inaugural release from Pernice's own Ashmont Records.
The World Won't End bounds in with the perfect pop of "Working Girls," which finds Pernice mulling the life of a lowly temp with lines like, "She summered every winter through a calendar from paradise/ "I was here," she scribbled in a restroom to prove she was alive/ All the working girls are fine/ Sunlight sun shines/ Contemplating suicide or a graduate degree." The six-piece band perversely backs this up with a peppy arrangement, setting up the fundamental tension that makes this a successful record.
Combining depressing themes with infectious melodies and jubilant music is hardly anything new-- Bobby Darin nearly perfected it in his too-brief career decades ago; early They Might Be Giants records still stand as a fine example-- but the band and their conspirators (a total of ten people) give the music just the right edge of melancholy when it needs it. This usually comes in the form of David Trenholm's restrained string quartet arrangements. For the most part, the band also avoids the elevator-ready patches that tainted their debut.
Producer Thom Monahan, a long-time cohort of Pernice from his days in the Scud Mountain Boys, lends the album an autumnal sound that smacks of recent efforts by Archer Prewitt; you get the sense that the leaves are turning outside, and the temperature dropping. It's probably safe to imagine that the band, most of them New England natives, feel at home with a sound that evokes that kind of imagery.
For his part, Pernice keeps on spinning out winning break-up songs and thanatopses, such as "Flaming Wreck," in which he details his final thoughts ("I'm alright") as his aircraft plunges five miles into the ground, killing all aboard. His sometimes ragged vocals receive some welcome help here as well, with most of the band harmonizing gorgeously on the refrain. It's this and countless other moments that offer insight into the meaning of the album title: the world won't end; it already has.
But even though Pernice's lyrics threaten to turn into a pity party at any second, the ebullient music that backs him always comes up strong, providing concentrated multi-vitamin blasts of delicious pop. And at the end, the record's closer, "Cronulla Breakdown," marries a closing-time-at-the-hotel-lounge delivery with a fabulous Beatlesque melody, proffering a final swipe at failed relationships with the line, "We try so hard to make the worst of a bad situation," summing it all up over bongos and acoustic guitar.
It all amounts to what, for me, is the best record Pernice & Co. have made yet. Though it had its moments, I was never in love with the Scud Mountain Boys' brand of jazzy country, nor with Pernice's slow-core Chappaquiddick Skyline project. Here, however, he and his latest band seem to have found a comfortable vehicle for delivering his world-weary messages, and the results are definitely worth hearing.
