Chappaquiddick Skyline – Self-Titled
Following up his kitchen-table bent-country music stint with the Scud Mountain Boys, Joe Pernice reappeared in 1998 with the desolate pop majesty of the cheekily titled Overcome With Happiness. Dark little ditties of death, devastation and dire consequence, the songs cloaked themselves ever so prettily in the dulcet tones of eminently hummable pop. Overcome found itself on many a critic’s top ten list for that year, alongside Elliot Smith’s XO. In fact, Pernice is to the Eastern Seaboard as Smith is to the Pacific Northwest.
Chappaquiddick Skyline, as with the Scuds’ Sub Pop debut, Massachusetts, is wholly ensconced in sense of place, from the New England-inspired titles to the particularly American duality of spaciousness and spare simplicity of content and context. And while Pernice may well be making songs to sing along to, songs your mother wouldn’t ask you to turn down, they have substantial (if deceptive) weight, bite and soul.
From the top of Chappaquiddick come melodic guitar, keyboard and vibes twisted round harmonically derived “ooooohhh” vocals. As if a trick, the first lyric is quite plainly, “I hate my life.” With that, the listener is immersed in the hummy strum and magic tinkle, unaware of the barbed wire just beyond the daisies.
In the bio that accompanied press copies of the record, Pernice tells a little tale about kids who don’t make the team, and about one good-hearted young hockey player who was never quite scrappy enough to risk the edge required to be great in the game — until, in one exquisitely defining moment, the young stickman hits a wall, and in the white noise of the arena’s silence, completely freaks out. Loses control. In front of God and everybody. Henceforth to disappear from the world in which he is known. Decades later, Pernice learns that the boy became a physicist of some renown, surmising that he’s likely well adjusted, that “not every kid makes the team.” And that “the songs on Chappaquiddick Skyline are a lot like that kid.”
Drawing upon influences from Elvis Costello, Nick Drake and Big Star, (and suspiciously reminiscent of “Life In A Northern Town”-era Dream Academy), triple-threat Pernice has topped himself with a marvelous diamond in whose facets shine many such defining moments, in all their stark terror and nervous beauty.