Pernice Brothers, The World Won't End (Ashmont Records) 9+
The World Won't End may be the Pernice Brothers' second album, but it's really the result of a singular continuum started with The Scud Mountain Boys, Joe Pernice's first band. In a quest for the perfectly timeless pop song, Pernice left behind the alt-country style to produce several great albums, including The Pernice Brothers' Overcome By Happiness, the slightly more modest side project Chappaquiddick Skyline and last year's "solo" Big Tobacco, all with mainly the same personnel. They have developed a signature sound that distills the catchiest elements of 60s and 70s pop, from The Turtles to Big Star and Badfinger. The sounds are upbeat, sunny, sometimes positively, annoyingly bouncy. But on repeated listens, fiendish pleasure can be derived from the profoundly morbid and maudlin lyrics. No one can make a song of paranoia and dread of disaster sound so damn happy like the Pernice Brothers -- "I don't believe in love...Waiting for the mortal wound/This fascination with the moribund/looking out my dirty window I find...keep loving me to death." "Let That Show" is the album's most perfectly realized song, one that Wilco would sell their souls for. Sounding like a descendent of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, the elegiac "Endless Supply" is about the futility of trying to use music to heal wounds and win hearts. Lonely office temps in an indifferent world, unrequited love, suicide, and airplane crashes, The World Won't End is full of post-A.M. hits for the broody post-goth generation who are slightly disappointed that the world didn't end.
