Correction

Last December I wrote a preview for the Independent, the weekly I freelance for, about the Pernice Brothers, a pop band from Massachusetts who were coming to play here in town. I was given 300 words and I turned in a serviceable piece. (I flattered myself that the ample turnout to the show owed at least a little to my advance praise.) But I immediately regretted what I had published. It wasn't bad, but I noticed as I read other stuff online that lots of people called Joe Pernice's songs "literary" or "literate." That's true, but it's a vague description. You could say the same of Dylan, Scritti Politti, and Public Enemy, to name the first three that come to mind. And musically, after listening more deeply to the Pernice Brothers' new album, Live A Little, I had to admit that I was attributing too much influence to the genre loosely described as "Britpop."

I wished that I'd had a chance to publish something else about the Pernice Brothers. No major monograph or essay; I just wanted to correct myself. Then I realized I did have a chance: sobsey.com, a place where I can write whatever I want and pretend someone reads it.

Imagine that it is like six months ago.

The Pernice Brothers. Local 506, Chapel Hill, December 7th, 9:00 PM. With Elvis Perkins.

If you disregard the appendicular "Grudge F***," a rerecording of an old song by Joe Pernice's former band, the Scud Mountain Boys, then there are eleven new tunes on the Pernice Brothers' fifth album, Live A Little (Ashmont Records). Play the sixth track -- the middle one -- "How Can I Compare." The first verse is just Joe Pernice's instantly recognizable breath of a voice singing over his acoustic guitar: "Who isn't worse or better than they seem? / The chaste and slutty and the in-between / Him and her and she and her and him and she." Now some understated strings are added in, along with a flanged electric guitar, some modest but apt piano, bass and drums. Just before the chorus, Joe sings: "Some sleep the sleep of angels wrapped around somebody's wife." The song takes on some sweetly melancholy chord changes that evoke the best Britpop. After the chorus comes a bridge that starts to evoke the 1970s -- Bread, maybe, or the Bee Gees. A swell of strings gives way to Joe singing:

There's just so little time.
[unhurried piano & drum fill]
And now there's even less.

Is there a wittier, more mordant line about pop music, leisure, and mortality? It's like a slow but inescapable punch in the gut -- one that, each time you listen to it (and you keep wanting to), makes you ask yourself again what you're doing with your life. And it's placed at the virtual midpoint of the album, signaling a descent back to earth (including, two songs later, the buoyant, doubt-tinged singalong "PCH One"). You can practically see Joe winking at you, and hear him sighing gently during the languorous instrumental break, while he waits those few seconds before delivering his soul-crushing, side-splitting punchline. And then Peyton Pinkerton burns the lyric in with a searingly slow, twenty-six-second, two-guitar break that would fit nicely on a Faces ballad or even an old Elton John song. And by the time "How Can I Compare" concludes -- back where it started, just Joe and his acoustic -- you have heard the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, in the US and England, in three addictively melodic minutes.

Yet "How Can I Compare," like the ten other new songs on Live A Little, doesn't feel piecemeal, nor does it directly quote its forbears. It's a fully-formed pop song by a full-fledged band led by a gifted songwriter who has already had to climb out of two pigeonholes -- first the alt-country label with his old group, Scud Mountain Boys, then the Smiths/Cure/New Order comparison around the time of the Pernices' superb 2003 release Yours, Mine, and Ours. Sure, his lyrics are literate, but like Elvis Costello's they're intensely private and honestly felt, and more importantly -- also like Costello's -- they fit his music. With the uncompromising, hummable, confident Live A Little it's clear that, whomever else they may happen to echo in passing, the Pernice Brothers sound exactly like the Pernice Brothers. Would that more bands did.