Last week, I went to see my good friend and occasional songwriting collaborator Matt Hill –  aka Quiet Loner  –  play a solo show at The Windmill in Brixton.

Matt is a very talented Americana artist – as I once wrote in a review: “With pithy, sardonic lyrics about fallen angels and serial  killers, he is one of the UK’s finest alt-country balladeers”.

During his Brixton gig, Matt played a song that knocked me for six – a dark, wry murder ballad called The Cold Hard Facts Of Life, which is about a guy returning home a day early, to accidentally discover his wife is cheating on him with another man. The guy stumbles across the infidelity when he stops into a liquor store to pick up some pink champagne for him and his wife. Overhearing a bloke at the counter talking to the shop assistant about entertaining a woman while her husband is out of town, he only realises that the man is referring to his wife when he follows the guy’s car home and sees it is stopping outside his house. After supping from the bottle of champagne, the jilted guy then kills both his wife and her lover with a knife… Very, very country.

After the gig, I actually congratulated Matt on penning such a great track. More fool me.

“I didn’t write it,” he told me. “It’s by Porter Wagoner.”

I assumed Porter Wagoner was some obscure, uber-cool Americana band I’d never heard of, but Matt corrected me – he was in fact a US country singer who gave Dolly Parton her big break on his long-running TV show in the ’60s and ’70s. He died in 2007.

Wagoner was known for his flashy Nudie suits and blond pompadour hairstyle, but The Cold Hard Facts of Life is chilling and laced with black humour.

I thought Matt had written it, as it’s up there with his self-penned, macabre tales of murderers, misfits, losers and the loveless.

Below is a clip of Portner Wagoner performing The Cold Hard Facts of  Life on a US TV show.

I’ve also included footage of Quiet Loner playing Lucifer – a track that’s destined for his new album, out in November.

And for the sheer hell of it, I’ve thrown in Elvis Costello playing Psycho – Leon Payne’s song inspired by a Texas serial killer.

Now, I’m really spoiling you.

 

Goodbye, Killer, the first Joe Pernice band album since 2006’s Live a Little  is the sound of a man at the height of his powers.

Essentially, it’s everything I love about The Pernice Brothers, but with a little bit more.

Sure, there’s the usual crunchy, yet intelligent, indie alt rock
(Bechamel and Jacqueline Sussan), melancholy moments that recall The
Smiths  – Pernice wrote a book on his love for Meat Is Murder – and
polished AM radio pop with a dark undercurrent (the title track and
The Loving Kind), but this time around we also get a kooky,
honky-tonk-meets-country show tune – We Love The Stage – and,
generally, a raw, rough-hewn, rootsy, Americana feel to many of the
songs. This may be due to the fact that it was recorded in an attic in
 Boston.

Pernice’s usual cohorts are also along for the ride – brother Bob,
guitarist James Walbourne (Pretenders, Son Volt, and Peter Bruntnell)
and Ric Menck (Matthew Sweet, Velvet Crush).

We Love The Stage is one of the obvious highlights – a paean to being
a rock and roll band on the road, it’s distinctly more Morrissey than
Motley Crue (“We opened up for some Welsh singer who in the ’80s was
the rage, ‘cos love is love and we love the stage.”) and it even
 features a trombone-led knees-up. File it alongside other great songs
about being in a band or being a performer –  Mott The Hoople’s 
Saturday Gigs, Matt Monro’s If I Never Sing Another Song and Gene
Pitney’s Back Stage spring to mind.

Joe has spent years honing his craft, so much so that this record 
includes some of his best lyrics yet .

The Loving Kind is a classic Pernice breakup song  – it’s easily up there with Costello’s finest.

Or how the achingly beautiful Something For You? “If you love me like a bullet loves the sky – like a perfect shade of colour loves the eye.”

If you prefer something less romantic, then there’s always The Great
Depression: “You suck the life out of my family and friends.Even
 when I go to sleep, the bitch is breathing.”

Speaking about the album, Joe says: “My brother Bob once said that he
 started playing guitar when he was six, and 30 years later, still
 played like a six year-old. How true, how true. He also engineers like 
a six-year-old, which is seriously, a very, very good way to engineer.

“In my opinion, he did a great job capturing the sound of a band. And 
all hyperbole aside, recording great musicians like James Walbourne 
and Ric Menck doesn’t hurt. For Bob, recording someone like me
 definitely hurt. I’m not the most relaxed guy alive. Apparently, and I
 have no recollection of this, I  berated Bob at every turn, like he was a
 red-headed step child.”

Ah, Joe –  you kill me every time.

Goodbye, Killer is released on One Little Indian on June 14.

www.pernicebrothers.com