There were a couple of academic overachievers on stage upstairs at the Middle East last Sunday night, and when you put them together, headliner Joe Pernice (MFA, English) and opener Warren Zanes (soon-to-be-PhD, cultural studies) could have delivered a dissertation on the art of smart pop songcraft. Come to think of it, they did. The ex–Del Fuegos guitarist (Zanes) and former Scud Mountain Boys/current Pernice Brothers leader (Pernice) each, in his own way, demonstrated the marvels of melodic economy and the wonders of a well-turned lyric.
With more than a half-dozen albums split between his two primary outfits, the Scuds and the Pernice Brothers, as well as other alter ego side projects, Pernice has become a master of the pop song that tells it like it isn’t. The Pernice Brothers’ most recent album, last year’s The World Won’t End (Ashmont), seemed a perfectly benign portrait of chiming guitar landscapes and choruses floating amid shining orch-pop skies — until you noticed the black, suicidal clouds looming in the corners of the frame.
Joined by Pernice Brothers guitarist Peyton Pinkerton (whom he introduced as having "the greatest name in soft rock") during a trim 60-minutes, Pernice picked out chords on an acoustic guitar and sang deadly and beautiful songs about pop-art plane crashes ("Flaming Wreck") and waylaying a "dirty little shit" who "tried to love me underneath the bridge" ("Bum Leg") in a voice of almost indescribable tenderness. Words like "terrified" appeared with surreptitious regularity, and as Pernice lingered over them with sensual bitterness, Pinkerton embroidered the emotional devastation with a glistening downstroke of guitar or a small sunburst of color.
For a guy who wasn’t known as the principal songwriter or even the singer (that would be his brother, Dan Zanes) of the Del Fuegos, one of the most successful bands to emerge from Boston during the heyday of ’80s college rock, Warren Zanes delivered a pungent set of originals from his impending solo debut, Memory Girls. The album had been, as he put it, "tied up in legal hassles" with the good folks at Disney until he bought it back; it’s now scheduled for release next January. Backed by bass and drums, Zanes supported himself on acoustic guitar, and his voice sounded great — somewhere in among early Tom Petty, World Party’s Karl Wallinger, and prime Dwight Twilley. The songs, alternately sweet-tempered and gritty, were models of satisfying roots-pop concision. Guess besides writing a thesis, the guy’s learned something after all these years.
