Goodbye, Killer
Pernice Brothers
Score:55
Reviewer: Kyle Smith
Label: Ashmont (USA), Spunk (Australia)
Reviewed: Jul 25th '10, Released:2010
On Joe Pernice’s best work to date, 2003’s Yours, Mine & Ours, he and his band took a step beyond the trademark pleasant Americana and produced one of the most enjoyable indie pop records of the decade. Its 2005 follow-up, Discover A Lovelier You, was more ambitious, less successful, but still enjoyable. Disappointingly, however, the next two releases (including the 2009 solo ‘soundtrack’ to his novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop) saw a retreat to the middle of the road.
That retreat has reached such a point that it is now very hard to reconcile the pop smarts and relative urgency that characterised his 2000-2005 output with the lifeless and predictable fare he’s served up on Goodbye, Killer. The album suffers from not only terminal blandness but also a surprising degree of amateurism: it sounds at times like little more than a bedroom recording, with out of tune and poorly mixed vocals (‘Fucking and Flowers’), and slightly mis-timed country guitar solos (‘Newport News’).
The album starts acceptably and Pernice actually sounds re-energised on the first two tracks. Once you get past his strange over-singing, ‘Bechamel’ is passable but, with its gratuitous use of French culinary terms, stretches a lyrical gimmick too far. ‘Jacqueline Susann’ is closest to Yours, Mine & Ours territory and Pernice’s best composition in five years, despite the literary name-dropping.
Then Pernice gets embarrassingly self-referential on third track ‘We Love The Stage’: ‘I nearly drowned on my hotel room floor/But even so we made soundcheck by four.’ Ugghh. You always have to worry when a musician who’s getting on a bit starts writing songs about life on the road: they’re running out of ideas and forced to rely on nostalgia for the good old days. How can the listener relate? When Dean Wareham did it on Luna’s ‘Speedbumps’, he at least came up with a decent tune and, lyrically, a more abstract approach. Not so in the case of Pernice’s Being There-ish plodder.
Closer ‘The End of Faith’ is pretty but basically more of the pleasantly plucked folk pop he did well on 2000’s solo record Big Tobacco… until the multi-tracked ‘ooh-oohs’ of the outro – they’re a genuine treat.
It is comforting to know that Pernice is still around and that he’s still trying. Goodbye, Killer, however, is both a let-down and (paradoxically, considering the MOR comment above) the most marginal release yet from an increasingly marginal artist.
