Yours, Mine & Ours

Another Pernice Brothers album, and the journalistic multi-carriage express freighter of overawed cliche you are expecting will be arriving at platforms all over the nation any minute now. Your writer never really loved or hated this band: what is without exception consistently referred to as Joe Pernice’s Incredible Mastery Of Warm, Shimmering Melody, Bittersweet Arrangements And Classic Pop Song Construction just came on, to these ears, like hermetically-sealed parcels of sentiment, well-wrought and beautiful but essentially top-drawer art-student copies of the masters.

So it’s a bit of a shock to look past the familiar song shapes and find words sodden with genuine emotion, drunk on their own hugeness of feeling and simultaneously looking the inevitable disappointment and devastation that await straight in the eye. What helps is that this, their third, is The Pernice Brothers’ Guitar Album, and the decision to forego the impeccable arrangements of yore in favour of unapologetically prominent drums and guitars that rush and soar and sparkle is exactly the boyish, unadorned approach these otherwise quite complicatedly grown-up songs needed. Meanwhile, the chilling study in devastated malevolence that is album closer ‘Number Two’ is a masterpiece. “You were my life-sucking powermonger/Even so, you were mine,” Joe murmurs, his voice catching on its own poisoned barbs. “The city lights up like a dirty dime/I hope this letter finds you crying.” It finds me utterly shaken and amazed, anyway. Respect.