Pitchfork

Back when Joe Pernice wasn't in a band carrying his family name, he and his friends farted around in a modest alt.country group called the Scud Mountain Boys. The story goes that the quartet would sit around the kitchen table with their instruments and write and play their songs. After two self-released albums, they hit the big time (relatively speaking) with the Sub Pop-supported Massachusetts, a slow and somber effort featuring often beautiful songs about boxers, ottomans, and liquor stores. It ended up being the group's final effort-- Joe hooked up with his bro and some other folks, started up the Pernice Brothers to scratch his pop itch, and found himself growing amenable to that sort of scratching. Out of the bucket of tunes Pernice and his pals wrote around the kitchen table as Scud studs, only one song has found an afterlife with the Brothers; after years as a staple of the Pernice Brothers live show, it's finally been rerecorded. It might not be the sort of new life the song wants, though.

Originally, "Grudge F***" was an arena-sized mono-ironic AM-radio ballad trapped in a spindly acoustic shell. Pernice's earnest mewling on this track might recall "You Light Up My Life" or any Olivia Newton-John tearjerker, except that you'd never hear those lovely ladies lend their voice to a song about some broke-dick stoner dude begging for a mercy f***. When the chorus comes around-- "I would give anything to make it with you, just one more time/ I'd give you everything I own"-- it's pretty clear that all the narrator has to offer is some roach clips and a Foghat LP. It's sad and pathetic all at once, and the sparse backdrop of the song-- no drums, please, but a little piano would be lovely-- knowingly plays up both those angles. It's a nice piece of work (silly asterisks notwithstanding), and its inclusion in Pernice Brothers live sets isn't all that surprising.

Thirteen years later, "Grudge F***" finds itself all new for 2006, closing out the newest Pernice Brothers record, Live a Little. This record is a Scud reunion of sorts, with original SMB producer Michael Deming behind the boards. Deming was also the producer of the first Pernice Brothers, an album that naysayers and diehard Scud fans frowned upon because of its liberal (and supposedly awkward) deployment of strings and horns and all that non-Scud stuff. Those guys will be happy to put that frown back on their faces-- on this new album, the strings come in at all the wrong times. The 2K6 version of "Grudge F***" is the primary offender. What was once modest and understated is now louder than a bullhorn in a library. The track is gussied up with strings and drums and harmonies and all sorts of doodads that do a great job at destroying what made the track originally work. It's bad enough that the track's pseudo-dramatic bridge is undercut by this Spectorian bukkake-as-seppuku, but adding backing vocals that belabor the obvious-- hey, the narrator really is a loser!-- is just too much.

Unfortunately, "too much" seems to be a theme with this album as a whole. It's not a case of wanton and widespread overindulgence, though "Grudge F***" might make it seem otherwise. There are just a handful of brief but off-putting moments in almost every track that skillfully undercut the song as a whole. It doesn't take long for the album to step in it, either-- on the album's opening track, "Automaton", superfluous strings drop in on the chorus, Acme-anvil style. Directly following that, Pernice fricassees "Somerville" by cramming more syllables per line in the song's chorus than the lines will allow, scansion be damned. "Microscopic View" is a much better showcase for both Pernice's motormouth and his penchant for orchestral flourishes, but that's scuppered by a bombastic outro that ends falsely four times too many. And while the band's website praises Pernice's lyrics as being more "literary" than on previous albums, listening to the album twists that modifier into a pejorative descriptor.

Listening to Joe endlessly bombard the listener with rejiggered cliches and breathless streams of imagery and other examples of his lyrical craft, it sounds less like skillful, effortless writing and more like showy, over-considered craftwork. Sure, there are worse aesthetic crimes to be accused of than "trying too hard." As a longtime fan of Pernice's work, though, it's a struggle listening to a musician sound like he's forcing something that, once upon a time, sounded so natural. I'm not saying Pernice should cut back on the strings and go back to that kitchen table. However, instead of paying lip service to his roots (as he does here), he might be better served to take a longer look back at his previous life.