Metro Pulse/Music/Pernice Brothers

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What:
The Pernice Brothers

When:
Monday, Sept. 8, 9 p.m.

Where:
Pilot Light

Cost:
$8

After the Flood
Jay Farrar avoids labels and encourages listeners to make their own interpretations

The Pernice Brothers orchestrate gorgeous tunes

by Paige M. Travis

When I call Joe Pernice on a Monday morning, he's just woken up, and he got married three weeks ago. So it's probably not a good idea to profess my love.

It all started when I heard Overcome by Happiness, given to me by a friend who couldn't bear its overwhelming pop nature, unabashed catchiness, and joyful desperation. When his life called for lush treatises on self-pity and love's disappointments, he listened to The Smiths. Perfectly understandable. I, on the other hand, was in the market for newer material.

The instant the first notes of Overcome played through my speakers, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The joy I felt was akin to hearing an amazing record (say, Pet Sounds) for the first time and listening to an old favorite. The Pernice Brothers sounded new and familiar at the same time, like a favorite shirt in a different color.

Such was my glorious, fateful introduction to the band founded by former Scud Mountain Boys Joe and Bob Pernice. Joe is responsible for both the delirious pop sound and the melancholy lyrics. The way he sings about it, particularly on Yours, Mine & Ours, the band's third and most recent CD, love is an inevitable disease. But he's not mopey or morose (take that, Morrissey); he sounds accepting and resigned to his fate.

But when I have him on the phone, he just sounds a tad groggy. I ask Pernice if he's married. Yes, he got married three weeks ago to Laura Stein, his bandmate and girlfriend of more than five years.

"Are you married?" Pernice asks in return.

"No," I answer.

He wants to know why I asked. "Because you can't imagine why anyone would marry me?" he speculates.

No, I say, I just can't imagine how the person who writes these songs could believe in love as anything but a dreary inevitability, a dreadful trap, a beautiful trick.

In the liner notes to Yours, Mine & Ours (which smells faintly of dill), Pernice's words are typed out clearly: "I'll save you from the dreamy life, to the hardest love you could ever know...This love I have for you is ruinous and true" from "Weakest Shade of Blue." And there's "Sometimes this sweet life feels like it's never been as bad as it is tomorrow. It's all right, you can cry, living with the price of a world of sorrow" from "Baby in Two." It's all here in black and white and the gray of in between, but is that the whole story? The seeming contradictions of Pernice's uplifting melodies, his crooning, breathy voice threaded with a vein of subtle cynicism that are so alluring to me present no conflict for Pernice. As a songwriter, he doesn't think too much about his process, he says. It just happens, and he moves on.

"I think my musical tastes are classical pop melodies and structures," he says. "To me as a songwriter, it isn't a very conscious thing. It's just something that I really like to do. I get a little darker lyrically, and I respond to classical pop. It comes naturally."

It's a romantic and somewhat adolescent notion that people who write gorgeous, heartbreaking songs have some insight into why their songs have that effect. I don't feel disappointed when Pernice says he's just writing the songs that sound good in his head. When I'm drowning in the layered complexities of his music—it feels like the breathlessness of infatuation—that's just me and the inexplicable chemistry of my brain. But I'm no less thankful for his songs that make me feel so intoxicated, so uplifted and depressed simultaneously. I think to say so, but stop short. It might be too much for him. He's been through enough already what with getting married on a Monday and starting a European tour that Wednesday. The band experienced the extraordinary heat wave that's swept the continent. Wine grapes may thrive in hot weather, but American bands don't.

"We were in Spain for two or three days. It was hot, like being in Arizona," he says. The heat wasn't the main problem, Pernice says, or the humidity for that matter. Countries like Spain, France and England have "no concept of air conditioning.... Hotel rooms weren't air conditioned. We'd be 15 floors up, and you cook."

Back in the moderately steamy states, Pernice and his bandmates have continued their New Van Tour, gradually recovering from jetlag and colds caught in Ireland.

As he stands outside the hotel room on his cell phone, Pernice locates himself in Ohio, just outside Cleveland, where they played a good show the night before. He characterizes the audience as appreciative, but not as crazy as some crowds can get. "It was a Sunday night at the end of the summer," he says, setting the scene perfectly in just a few words. He paints a deceptively simple picture, just like in his perceptive songs. Joe Pernice isn't cynical about love. He's revealing the contradictions inherent in our lives and relationships. And if it causes a little heartbreak and joy along the way, count me in.