Joe Pernice is not the man he seems. One listen to the second album he's recorded with the Pernice Brothers, and it's easy to be overwhelmed by the infectious sunshine pop, the blissed West Coast harmonies, the cascading strings, the Teenage Fanclub-style good vibes.
Isn't there a kind of melancholy sigh in the way he sings, though? And what about those lyrics? Tales of plane crashes and soured relationships. Even when he sings of still being in love, in 'She Heightened Everything', Joe Pernice still can't resist comparing the experience to death.
'The World Won't End', then, is a beautifully-turned collection of miserable observations smuggled in under the cover of terrific jangling guitar pop. The first single, '7.30', is typical: a deliriously upbeat confection of pumping drums and heady "ba-ba-bas", undermined by the fact Pernice is singing, "But when 7.30 comes around there's nothing there, just bitterness."
As it happens, he's sounded a lot lower than this in the past, most notably as lead singer of the fabulously bleak Massachusetts band, The Scud Mountain Boys - a band whose three superb albums from the mid '90s render practically all of the allegedly "alt"-country plodders cluttering up mature record collections these days utterly irrelevant.
Now, his music's more chiming and less melodically maudlin, a little like The Byrds and Jimmy Webb and, on 'She Heightened Everything', The La's. As 'Our Time Has Passed' proves (just like 'Clear Spot' on '98's 'Overcome By Happiness'), though, he can write pretty songs about those messy end-of-the-affair moments with truly unnerving consistency. The sneaky, duplicitous dog.
