Nancy Spain's, Cork
Joe Pernice is a young man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Hunched over the microphone, grimly chopping out the chords, he seems a case study in collegiate gloom, a bespectacled melancholic, deep in a fog of coffee-house angst. The opening song is called I Hate My Life.
Incongruously, though, the music that Pernice and his Bostonian sidekicks rustle up is bright and spirited, a sturdy power-pop with an unerring radar for the feel-good hooks encoded in simple, redemptive melody. It's light as the summer breeze, a music to prompt the whoops of youth and loopy grins.
This kind of split personality is probably what distinguishes the band from the American Indie norm. The Pernice brothers (they number five, they are not brothers) are unashamedly a pop act and so they work a seam that is often neglected.
They pick and mix from the breakthrough Overcome by Happiness album and the acclaimed new release The World Won't End, along with cuts from Pernice's darker solo works such as Chappaquiddick Skyline. Songs such as Working Girls and Seven-Thirty are literate and classily constructed. You get the impression they are painfully sourced and hard fought for.
Some odious comparisons: the nifty keyboard work that underpins many of the songs hints of an education in Philadelphia soul, while Joe's intense but hopeful delivery suggests he might have a few old Elvis Costello records lying around.
Lyrically, its dark stuff. Once Pernice has tricked you into his lair with the sugary tunes, he lays his heart bare and the world-view is bleak. His chief concern is the timeworn one: love lost. He gives the impression of a man conspicuously unsuccessful in romance.
Occasionally, it errs towards the lachrymose but usually Pernice pulls back in time. His voice isn't particularly distinctive but it has a good old yearn to it. This is pop music but it has aspirations, it aspires to art. It will get there yet.