From The Desk Of Joe Pernice: Lego

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: My wife used to play in a band called Jale. They were signed to Sub Pop at the same time my old band the Scud Mountain Boys were. That’s how we met. When her band broke up, she played piano in the Pernice Brothers. After for a few years of that nonsense, she decided to retire from music. She’s now a designer for Bruce Mau Design up in Toronto. Honestly, I don’t know what the hell she does. High-concept stuff. Not matching drapes to carpets. As part of her birthday present, I recently bought her the Lego version of the Guggenheim Museum. It’s pretty cool. She and our four-year-old son are assembling it a little bit at a time. It will probably take them longer to put the model together than it did the actual museum, but what the hell. They’re having fun. I get headache looking at things that small. But I will say this, those Lego people have things dialed in. My son is way into Lego. It’s crazy. His pupils go big and black, and he locks on. I have a hunch. I’m going to slip a small Lego cube under my tongue. I will let you know if I start to beam.

Video after the jump.