The Post should fire this guy and hire Jadetree as a music reviewer. This album sounds more like the Smiths (as Jadetree says) than it does the Beach Boys.
And in the Post yesterday, a writer said Skynard was the best American band ever. Who am I to believe?
PERNICE BROTHERS "Yours, Mine & Ours"Ashmont
The Beach Boys may well be the greatest American rock 'n' roll band of all time, but in recent years they have degenerated into the most grotesque of oldies acts. Yet the spirit of Brian Wilson's music lives on, thanks to such acolytes as Lindsey Buckingham, Matthew Sweet, the High Llamas, the Swimming Pool Q's and Andy Paley. The latest recruit to the cause is Joe Pernice, and the latest Pernice Brothers album, "Yours, Mine & Ours," is full of the lonely yearning, natural imagery, strange chord changes and feathery vocal harmonies that marked the Beach Boys' greatest music.
There has always been a buried hint of chamber pop in Pernice's music -- as the chief singer-songwriter for the Pernice Brothers, Chappaquiddick Skyline, the Scud Mountain Boys and his own solo discs -- but it blossoms into the foreground on the new album. Not coincidentally, the expected songs of doom and gloom are now interspersed with hopeful romantic visions. When he asks a woman to "come away with me and begin something we can't understand; I'm as lonely as the Irish Sea and as willing as the sand," he bolsters his invitation with chiming guitar figures and swooning "ahs." When he describes a new love that leaves him feeling "blinded by the stars, so familiar that it feels too strange," he evokes the strangeness with chord progressions that wander off course and the familiarity with harmonies that recall Hawthorne, Calif., circa 1966.
-- Geoffrey Himes
Appearing Saturday at IOTA. â?¢ To hear a free Sound Bite from the Pernice Brothers, call Post-Haste at 202-334-9000 and press 8130. (Prince William residents, call 703-690-4110.)
