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Nothing says "surf's up" or "convertible tops down" like a Pernice Brothers record that hits the streets in early summer, and no one can breath breezy, sun-splashed melodies into three-minute fits of aggravation and despair quite like songwriting maestro Joe Pernice. On this fifth album (and as he with his previous band, the
The Scud Mountain Boys), Pernice masks his sardonic report on a hypocritical, fearful, dumbed-down world with hooks and choruses you'll remember after three listens. Whether he's poeticizing about Gotham City ("Say Goodnight to the Lady"), overdosing on Chet Baker ("There Goes the Sun") or dreaming of a better life with browbeaten urgency ("Amazing Glow"), Pernice dresses up his dreams in music that will make your smile. And when he ruminates in "Saddest Quo" about train wrecks, plane crashes and the suffocation from tabloid TV ("It's a sad status quotient/Waiting for the sky to fall"), you can sing along, but you can't help but feel Pernice "choking on a blind faith far from broken." Brilliant stuff.
--Scott Holter
Product Description
Discover a Lovelier You is the fifth recording by The Pernice Brothers, their fourth for their own Ashmont Records, and the 10th album overall for Joe Pernice in his various musical incarnations. Picking up where Yours Mine and Ours (2003) left off, this one has 12 artfully crafty Joe Pernice originals, evoking and inspired by transportation catastrophes, George Harrison, O. Henry, Duran Duran, Claire Danes, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Morricone and other fascinating Italians, non-Italians and mise-en-scenic situations. Despite all the outside influences, Pernician flourishes abound. These are Joe's best songs to date, wellexecuted and tight, and all things being relative, that's good. And as if that weren't enough, there are two waltzes.