Pernice Brothers

"Bechamel"

by Patrick Rapa

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The new Goodbye, Killer (Ashmont) is a wonderful specimen of acoustic pop — 10 tracks that flesh out rock 'n' roll skeletons with twangy guitar solos — but that's not all it is. Take the album's breathy, upbeat lead-off, "Bechamel": While your ears are drawing dotted lines to the Beatles, Paul Simon and Elliott Smith, your subconscious is tracing more sinister connections, between love and consumption. That late-blooming refrain is calling it love, but is it really? Does love go down like a force-fed aperitif, with an "aftertaste like aspartame"? Does it leave you with an unsatisfiable urge to devour and destroy? Pernice is adamant, demanding: "I want her bones and I want her flesh/ and it's all she'll give me I want the rest." The answer, of course, is yes: Love is like that for vampires and we're kinda all vampires. You're just not used to admitting it in a rock song.