Pernice Brothers
Fact: Joe Pernice is one of the greatest songwriters of his time.
Opinion: Most of the Pernice Brothers' CDs are on sale at their website.
Follow-up: Discuss the greatness of Joe Pernice here.
I'll start. The World Won't End is one of [del]my favorite[/del] the best albums of the past decade. "Working Girls (sunlight shines)" is such an achingly perfect pop song the music industry could have shut down after it was recorded and I'd still be satisfied.
Opinion: Most of the Pernice Brothers' CDs are on sale at their website.
Follow-up: Discuss the greatness of Joe Pernice here.
I'll start. The World Won't End is one of [del]my favorite[/del] the best albums of the past decade. "Working Girls (sunlight shines)" is such an achingly perfect pop song the music industry could have shut down after it was recorded and I'd still be satisfied.
Comments
True.
The last album sucked.
Part of the problem with that album is that it doesn't sound finished - it's a clean sound, but it comes off as more like a bunch of demos. Whoever did the production was probably trying for "rawness" but it doesn't really work - that kind of material needs little keyboard flourishes, the occasional string section, bells and xylophones and things like that. It's too stripped down, at least in my opinion.
I wish the Scud Mountain Boys and Chappaquiddick Skyline were on sale, too, since I've got all of the Pernice albums. I'll at least pick up the CD/DVD set.
Edit: I just got the whole album and the 2010 Woven Hand from emu. I'll see if either has any impact on my list before I really publish it.
I was listening to this just now... ridiculously underrated band, almost tragically so in fact.
Luckily, Joe Pernice/Scud Mountain Boys/Pernice Bros. got their start out in Northampton, so they were a local band.
You know, I forgot until I wrote this - I bought the album on the strength of the video. Wow! Do you remember the days?
One of the many reasons to have loved and to miss The Gilmore Girls was the cool music. In the last episode, they gave a lot of their favorites cameos as troubadours. The first and best was a spotlight for our boy Joe. Yo La Tengo, Kim Gordon and her daughter Coco, and Sam Phillips are others.
One of the best live shows I ever saw was Grant Lee Buffalo at the Center Stage theater in Atlanta.
I'd only heard OF GLP before Gilmore Girls - the show was the first time I heard him, and wound up really enjoying him. But I suspect that that may be the last time anyone sees Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth or Joe Perniece on a network TV show. It was only the 5th network, but still.
That video for "Working Girls" practically laid down the foundation (for better or worse) for so many of the the lo-fi, chillwave, indie vids the kids put out these days.
"Neil Young? Who's that?" "He's one of the Monkees."
Agree about the PB video, though. It felt so retro at the time that you could feel that it was going to be ahead of its time for a long time. It still knocks me out.
To get back to Joe, there are a couple of wonderful clips of his appearance on KEXP a while back. I'm a HUGE fan of Steve Wynn, the guy who epitomizes "indie" to me. (I'll save that conversation for another day.) Joe does a sweet little cover of Tell Me When It's Over, a tune Steve wrote while in The Dream Syndicate. The song was of course written for a feedback-drenched sledgehammer of sound, and while it doesn't have Joe's typically lyric lyrics, it's a Joe-esque sentiment, and he manages to make one of my all-time favorites sound an awful lot like his own. Go Sawx!
You'll see the rest of the clips there, but I want to especially point you to Joe reading from his book, It Feels So Good When I Stop. Go Sawx!