For more than a decade, the Pernice Brothers have mostly made plush, romantic orchestral pop that doesn’t gild the lily once tended by the Zombies, Walker Brothers and Elvis Costello. True to frontman Joe Pernice’s working-class nature, the band’s sixth and latest album, Goodbye, Killer (Ashmont), does away with the sighing string section and goes straight for the guitars, from the mod-rock riffing of “Jacqueline Susann” to the Teenage Fanclub power-pop of “Something For You.” After a four-year spell between albums, the Pernice Brothers return with their leanest and most efficient effort to date. Pernice will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Pernice: The people at PBS know what they’re doing. They save the really, really good shit for pledge week. And why not? That’s how I’d do it. Alone In The Wilderness (Bob Swerer Productions) is a documentary so over-the-top engaging and inspiring, you will most likely buy it, if not for yourself, then as a gift for someone else. Sometime during the early 1960s, retired navy sailor Dick Proenneke headed out into the Alaska wilderness, intent on surviving alone for a year like a frontiersman. He built himself a cabin and camp using only his outrageous skills and hand tools. (In most cases, he’d made the tool handles as he figured—correctly—it was easier to hike out into the middle of nowhere without the added weight of the handles.) For those of you who have difficulty assembling one of those Ikea Billy bookcases, the self loathing in your unconscious might bubble up when you watch Proenneke fashion a door hinge and bear-proof lock out of a dead tree stump. I mean, I’m a pretty handy guy, and even I couldn’t look my wife in the eyes.
Video after the jump.
