Confessions of a Fanboy

One of the real highlights of the self-titled release from Chappaquiddick Skyline is the cover of New Order’s “Leave Me Alone.”

It is an amazing thing to take a song, change very little from the original version, and still have it somehow sound perfectly at home among a collection of original tunes. I suppose one way of looking at that is to call Chappaquiddick Skyline a New Order ripoff. Maybe it is, but I doubt it. New Order never did much for me and I love CS. That’s a profound difference right there.

Joe Pernice has recorded under at least 912 monikers during his career, and Chappaquiddick Skyline is the first set of songs by him I ever heard.

I love “Leave Me Alone” because it has one of Joe’s less mannered vocal deliveries. Joe Pernice has an impossibly pretty, high-register voice. On “Leave Me Alone,” Joe brings it down just a touch and he takes a little something off the precious quotient. He delivers the song in a low-key fashion, and it washes over you in waves, the song sounding like a gentle tide coming in.

As I listened to more Pernice music, I began to understand and hear the link between him and New Wave artists. It makes sense that he would cover New Order. What surprises me is that it sounds so completely at home on a lo-fi record. I’m by no means a New Wave expert, but lo-fi is not an adjective that comes to mind when describing the genre. It works here. It is one of the highlights of a very strong record.

“You get these words wrong…”

Filed under: Tags: Joe Pernice, No Cover Charge