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!

Actual results are kinda mixed. I can’t, unfortunately, say I hate the whole record. I like will.i.am’s showcase “Big Fat Bass,” for one, and I’m bemused by how (deluxe edition tracks) “He About to Lose Me” and “Don’t Keep Me Waiting” sound like mashups between dance songs and indie rock/emo tunes respectively. But while I’m not well versed enough in the genre conventions to know how specifically imitative this is, it mostly strikes me like watered-down Ke$ha. The sonic stuff I dig is almost exactly the same: low-register synths so distressed they approach musique concrète; pitch correction so drastic it stops being a crutch for poor singing and turns into something more like a new instrument. (In particular, “Till the World End” uses the chopped-up sustained vowel sound that Ke$ha used on “Blow,” among others; Ke$ha has a writing credit on the track, so presumably she’s not feeling too aggrieved. The last-syllable-in-line pitch-diving-toward-the-subsonic trick that I first heard in Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” also appears several times. Dr. Luke, the producer/co-writer behind many Ke$ha songs, co-produced 5 songs here, so maybe the resemblance is more deliberate than coincidental.)

But it doesn’t also seem to matter who sings these songs. Ke$ha’s personality may be repulsive, but at least she has one. Her audible sneer is distinctive, but you can also hear the humor in her lyrics (and some of her lyrics are better than anything here). On this record Spears has the personality of a Stepford Wife; she manages to deliver Groucho Marx’s “would you hold it against me” gag like she doesn’t know it has any reading other than the suggestive one. And “Up N’ Down” makes me feel better about the mid-life crisis angle; it’s smutty for sure, but mostly it’s just ridiculous.

p.s. to save you having to look it up if you don’t recall, it was The Bellamy Brothers who topped the the country charts with “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold it Against Me”; according to TMZ.com, Bellamy Brothers are peeved, not suing, but they were hit with a hit with a defamation suit from Dr. Luke. Classy. Maybe the Groucho Marx estate can get in on the action.

Veruca Salt’s Eight Arms to Hold You is my personal apotheosis of mainstream-leaning female-fronted alterna rock. Beyond the honey/tabasco combo of Nina Gordon and Louise Post’s voices, the magic is in how its weaknesses reinforces each other: Gordon’s and Post’s writing, trending toward sappiness and tunelessness respectively, are unexpectedly redeemed by Bob Rock’s hamfisted metalhead production.

I mention this because my judgment in this area is a little suspect. If something pushes my “Eight Arms” button (and this does — the repeated “I know” chorus lead-in of “Kiss Me” even specifically recalls the repeated “I know” leading into the refrain of Veruca Salt’s “Awesome,” although that’s probably a happy accident) I may overlook flaws that would otherwise bug me.

This has a few too many songs with carefully non-specific lyrics, but it also has “Cigarettes” with the rather surprising phrase, “I might run home and kill all my friends.” Abisha Uhl delivers that line off-handedly, not nümetal like she means it, which makes even better (in general I prefer her singing when she’s not pushing her voice hard, as on this track). If I were mixing the record I would have opted for a little more crunch versus chime in the guitars, but this also has a some slightly dark, pop-goth seasoning here and there (like scarling., say) which I don’t mind either.

Guilty pleasure? Maybe. Probably. But a pleasure, all the same.

Stream both tracks from Melodic Records’ soundcloud page

You can check out “Witches vs. Wolves” at New York Night Train Recordings, and there are more links from there. S-S-S-Spectres EP Sea Potentia Divina is also available from eMusic and iTunes.

I’m way late to the party with this one. All the hip Brooklyn music blogs cooed over this back in 2007, and the band has already broken up. Sigh.

I have gone all completist about S-S-S-Spectres, and there’s evidence on the Internets that people have listened to tracks — notably “Magic Mountain Reference” and “Your Hands Are Missing Mine” — that I haven’t yet been able to track down. If you can help me listen to those, please get in touch.

So I went looking for info, and found plenty at the Simulacra CD Baby page. Turns out there are neither keyboards nor guitars on this recording — it’s all clarinet. No joke — the distorted B-flat clarinet is provided by project mastermind Aaron Novik, and the distorted bass clarinet is courtesy Cornelius Boots of “Edmund Welles, the world’s only composing ensemble for bass clarinet quartet,” which I will probably have to check out. The great drumming is from Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum/Book of Knots) and the vocals are by Jesse Quattro (of heavy metal band Hammers of Misfortune and Mr. Bungle/Faith No More guitarist Trey Spruance’s Secret Chiefs 3 project).

I love the cheap-sounding keyboards (Casio? I can live in hope). I love the also cheap-sounding and frequently fuzzed-out guitar and bass (Slates amps and Skinny Rat guitars? Sounds like they could be), the determinedly plonky single-note guitar lines they play, and the sudden sheets of blissful noise they make. I love Golf’s “what is pitch and why should I be bothered with it?” and “Do I think I’m Stephen Malkmus, or do I think I’m Andy Falkous?” vocals. I love that the song title “FKUSA” stands for “French-Kissing in the USA” and not the ruder thing it also might stand for. I love how that song devolves into its own remix, and then further devolves into what Jason Korzen* might call an “ambient industrial dronescape.” I love “Mlle Amy Dutronc”’s occasional backing vocals and her lead turn on “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray”. I love the “we can’t afford all those fancy microphones” drum tone. I love the unexpected, gloriously ragged horns that rip open “It’s Coming Straight for Us” just when you think you’ve pegged it as a foul-mouthed and perhaps uninspired rip-off of Aiden Moffat’s songwriting style.

I love how, while some of Smokers Die Younger’s influences are obvious enough, this band doesn’t sound especially beholden to any one of them in particular.

I love the sheer stones this band consistently displays: the potentially-offputting name, starting their album with the harshest, least-welcoming track (”Bad Driving School”), tackling a Patsy Cline showpiece song with nothing like the requisite equipment, avowing that their eclecticism warrants coining their own genre (”hard trasp”).

I love that I can listen to X Wants the Meat straight through and want to hear the whole thing again immediately.

Perhaps most of all, I love how Smokers Die Younger takes attributes that would usually be weaknesses and mutates them into strengths.

If you would like to see if you love them too, you can listen free to maybe my favorite song, “I Spy Dry Fear” at last.fm. Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation can hook you up with a physical copy if you’re in the UK or don’t mind international postage&packing; I got my 320K MP3 hookup from Pure Groove Digital, which I endorse despite a clunky download user interface; and iTunes Music store is another digital option.

* SDY sound nothing like the sprites, truly, but Korzen’s coinage is too apt to not swipe, and too good to not attribute.