Then he brought up his brother Bob on electric guitar, and his two of his former bandmates in Scud Mountain Boys, Tom Shea on mandolin, and Stephen Desaulniers on electric bass (since Bob played some guitar in Scud Mountain Boys, it was very nearly a full reunion, but Pernice mentioned there’d been some recent discussion with original guitarist Bruce Tull about playing together again, too). Last night’s set was special in a way you don’t get to hear very often: both a little rough, and also spot-on. I don’t think the quick pre-song conversations about key and tempo were staged for the audience’s benefit, and there were a few audible blown cues — but the guys recovered from them really fast, and without a trace of tentativeness. Only band members who are really listening to each other can pull that off. Pernice was visibly laughing in the first chorus of Olivia Newton John’s “Please Mister Please” — which didn’t stop him from singing it like a heart wound was being reopened. And Desaulnier’s harmonies were just there in a way I wouldn’t expect after a 14-year hiatus. Magic.

In addition to being a fantastic writer, Pernice is also — back to baseball again! — a five-tool singer. He’s solid at the technical things rockers are not necessarily known for: intonation, breath control, mic technique — and he’s got compelling phrasing and often gut-wrenching (but critically understated, not oversold) emotional delivery, to boot. To my mind, Pernice and Ted Leo are at the top of the male indie-rock singing heap. So when I saw some singer-songwriter dude I never heard of getting set to open for Pernice, my first instinct was pity: “poor guy, he’s about to get schooled.” Only it turns out Paul Melançon is also a pretty great singer — killer pure tenor, an effortless upper register, gorgeous delivery and solid technique. He knocked Neil Finn’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” — by no means an easy song to sing — outta the flippin’ park. Basically after about 4 or 5 bars of his first number I’d decided to buy his latest disc, and after I stopped being too distracted by his voice to pay attention to the songs (and his wry patter), I was committed to picking up everything I could lay hands on.

Dept. of egregious naval gazing: The Lizard Lounge was one of the venues for my first date with she who is now my wife (my wife! I feel like that always needs an exclamation point) and the Scud Mountain Boys, in a weird but awesome bill with Jenny Toomey and Jale, were in the first handful of live shows I ever wrote about on the Internets. Danger Will Robinson! Creeping nostalgia!

The Ackleys (2005); Forget Forget, Derive Derive (EP, 2006)
Indie-power-pop. Splashy drums, some keyboards give it a slightly new-wave sheen.

as King Everything:

The Drought (2008)
Mostly acoustic guitar/vocal

with P.S. Eliot:

The Bike Wreck Demo (2008, read about Bike Wreck demo here), Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds (2009), Living in Squalor (EP, 2010, pay-what-you-want download), Sadie (2011)

Except for the demo, which is crazy blissed out fuzzerific, this is straight up pop-punk. If you have to play the sounds-like game, maybe try Sarge, but since you can at least sample some guilt-free, don’t bother playing sounds-like; just listen & decide for yerself.

with Bad Banana:

Crushfield (2010; artist-approved download (mediafire))

Treble and sugar overdose low-fi buzz saw pop-punk. Yum.

as Waxahatchee:

Split release with Operation Cliff Clavin (2010)

Severely-traumatized-microphone-style acoustic guitar/vocal record. If not for the Internets, I’d still be wondering if “Clumsy” was a tune on one of the KRS Elliott Smith albums that I’d somehow overlooked due to its proximity to all the other awesome songs on those records. A thing about Crutchfield’s singing and production: it hasn’t, ’specially lately, fetishized clarity or anything, so a thing that happens a lot is I’ll be digging a tune basically just because it’s catchy and a really good lyric line will just jump out and floor me. So it’s helpful that the lyrics for the Waxahatchee split are available.

(Also on the read-the-words tip: Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds)

Except for Sadie, which is not out yet and now near the top of my “most anticipated releases” list, I think I listened to everything on this list as least twice this week. So, yeah, I endorse this.

h/t I Could Die Tomorrow, without whom my week woulda been a little duller

In Pellet Gun’s hands the song is almost-but-not-quite unrecognizable without the lyric. The slightly sneery talk-sung vocal recalls Henry Rollins (especially on “Slip It In”) or Big Black’s Albini, with just a dash of the brilliant, demented disrespect Artie Sinatra brought to Dinosaur Jr’s covers of Young’s “Lotta Love” and The Byrd’s “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better.” The sheer quantity of guitar noise reminded me of Book of Knot’s magnificent deconstruction of “The Ballad of John Henry” from Traineater, but although both tracks are amply spiky, “John Henry” lurches, but “Rock and Roll” drives.

I really want to hear more from this band and/or the people in it, but the album credits only have this to say about Pellet Gun: Eric, Guitar; Dave: Bass; Brian: Drums. Any additional info would be appreciated. The only “Pellet Gun” I can find on the Internetubes is an Arkansan blues/funk/rock act — very clearly not them.

I try to avoid Neutral Milk Hotel as a point of comparison, not least because it sets a standard that’s insanely difficult to live up to. To say an album isn’t as good as In the Aeroplane over the Sea is criticism so faint as to be useless. Jeff Mangum used an intensely personal vocabulary of metaphor and symbolism to make a singular and complex album that retains emotional directness in spite of lyrical content that is sometimes willfully obscure (and sometimes seems to deflect personal connections through historical vehicle of Anne Frank).

Comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel also often strike me as fundamentally misguided. Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (for instance) is also an obviously literate songwriter with a similar vocal timbre who sometimes uses similar arrangements. I don’t think The Decemberists are much like Neutral Milk Hotel in terms of their artistic approach or goals (or, really, the level of artistic achievement). I don’t mean to slight Meloy’s outfit too much; “I Dreamt I Was an Architect” is clever, pretty, and despite an intrinsic preciousness it’s not emotionally unaffecting. But “Two-Headed Boy” is deeply weird — the lyric is weird, Mangum’s melody and phrasing are weird, the very sparseness of it is weird. But it’s also compelling, because Mangum inhabits the performance completely; there’s something almost scary about the way he sings and plays the song.

Like The Decemberists, Elvis Perkins’ Ash Wednesday shares many superficial qualities with Neutral Milk Hotel: a timbral vocal similarity, arrangements centered around an acoustic guitar that marches doggedly along through the songs, often picking up other instruments along the way, sometimes including a saw. But as unfair as the NMH comparison may be — Ash Wednesday was in the upper percentile of 2007 releases, but probably not of the decade — it also seems apt, both thematically and because one of Ash Wednesday’s hallmarks is the intensity of Perkins’ performances.

Ash Wednesday also evokes another classic album it can’t quite live up to. Like Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers, Ash Wednesday is a record that seems to be fueled by deep and nakedly evident pain. It wrestles with age-old questions like “why do bad things happen to good people?” and “what am I doing here, anyway?” (Given the details of Perkins’ biography this is scarcely surprising.) When Perkins sings “No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive,” he really sounds like he means it, and his intensity is compelling and maybe even a little scary.

Perkins’ artistic approach isn’t merely diaristic; the opening “While You Were Sleeping” piles a Dylan-esque torrent of fable-like events upon its sleeper over it’s 6-minute span:

The heavens fell/The earth quaked/I thought you must be/but you weren’t awake/You were dreaming/You ignored the sun/You grew your power garden/For your little ones/And you found brides for them/On Christmas Eve/They hung young Cain/From the Adam tree.

“Sleep Sandwich,” (which would’ve been my mix-pick) is full of oddball but evocative imagery, like, “Last night was the science fiction/Movie with you and me/You in your velvet space helmet/Me in my rainbow hat,” and the even better, “You write the Bible/And I’ll read it off my eyelids.” Even a pair of songs (”It’s a Sad World,” “Good Friday”) that skirt the “sleep with me ’cause I’m hurting so bad” cliché do so with unusual sublety and ample conviction. Thanks to some truly gorgeous harmonies, they’re also among the album’s strongest (Perkins’ stable of backup singers includes Shana Levy from Let’s Go Sailing and Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond).

Producer/arranger Ethan Gold makes an enormous contribution to the excellence of this record. Throughout, his choices support and enrich the songs without overwhelming them. Allmusic doesn’t list any prior production credits for him, but I just can’t believe this is a debut recording effort. Gold seems to have chosen not to use pitch correction software on Perkins’ vocals, a choice which I applaud. Perkins pushes his voice out of his range and beyond his technical chops, but it adds to the honesty and immediacy of his performances.

I usually take “garage” to be short-hand for concepts like “sloppy,” “raw,” and “uncomplicated.” Pristine’s tough guitar sound is plenty raw, but they’re nohow sloppy nor uncomplicated. Hands Up! Hands Up!’s songs are full of rhythmic and chromatic shifts, and the band is plenty tight.

There’s an unwritten rule of music journalism that bands with female singers shall only be compared to other bands with female singers; I’m not interested in perpetuating it. The gender makeup of the band and the yelpy, often overlapping, and high-pitched vocals are probably going to ensure that this band draws comparisons to that band that Corrin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were in.

But my primary point of reference is mathy latter-day punkers like Hot Snakes. The choppy and key-hopping riffs of “Daddy Told Me” and ‘Mr. Sandstill” even remind me of weird heavy metallers Voivoid (minus the solos and sci-fi concepts). Like Hot Snakes, Pristine isn’t big on stylistic variation. “Fuckin Indie” is the biggest departure; there’s a wee bit of keyboard, and it flirts with a surf-punk vibe before diving back into rip-your-face-off crunch. But what they lack in versatility, they make up in consistency; the disc has plenty of high points — all of the aforementioned tunes, “Hobson’s Choice,” and “Lost ‘n’ Loyal” among them — but it doesn’t have any weak spots.