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: I’m not into the social networking stuff like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. My business partner Joyce Linehan is into Twitter. She tweets everything I don’t really say. Whatever. Our label, Ashmont Records, is right now releasing a book called Pernice To Me. It’s a collection of tweets. There’s some funny shit in there. Stuff I might have said if I was funnier. The closest I come to networking socially is participating in a small baseball chat group. It started as a simple email correspondence between myself and friend who worked as a TV producer for Major League Baseball. My sometimes drummer, part-time writer and full-time friend Pat Berkery signed on next. He’s a cuckoo ball fan. After that came a good Christian kid from Texas. Finally, the Steve Wynn came into the fold, and the group was complete … for now. It’s a good group because we all love the sport more than we love our teams. I suggest people with a common interest start a chat group. But keep it small and diverse. Our group is a true melting pot, and that keeps it interesting. We do some playful ball-breaking, and we might at times veer off on tangents that are blue tinted, but we’re all cool with that. It’s half the fun. And when your (my) team is on a particularly bad streak, those “culturally rich” tangents are all the fun. Sure, it’s a bit of a boys club. We’re boys. Oh, but I’m not into that fantasy sports stuff. A bit too Dungeons And Dragons for my money. It’s a slippery slope. By mid-season you find yourself eating dry Count Chocula by the fistful with a half-drunk three-liter thirst-buster of Mountain Dew precariously balanced on your mousepad. No thanks. Chatting is as far as I’ll go.
Video after the jump.
