“Clean up the living room,” is the most prosaic of statements at face value, but the band Porter Block’s new release, Clean Up The Living Room, addresses the larger issues, and therein lies the group’s genius: the ability to sound everyday while actually tapping into timeless truths. Their songs weave the specific into the universal throughout the record; listeners can sit back and enjoy upbeat-sounding pop tunes, or they can choose to think.

Frontman Peter Block, normally a guitarist, composed this album on piano, and, in pandemic fashion, sent it from New York to partner, multi-instrumentalist and production mastermind Caleb Sherman in Nashville. Sherman fleshed out Block’s skeletal voice-and-piano recordings with deliberately sparse arrangements that added muscle without mass. Block drove to Tennessee to put the finishing touches on the record in person.

The songs here balance shadow and light, hope and regret, faith and doubt, bright, sunny power-pop arrangements with dark, sardonic lyrics. “Our songs have always tended to be these upbeat, positive pop tunes that just confirm the absolute worst about human nature,” Peter Block said with a laugh.

Block told Elmore a little about the reach of this particular song: “’Say Something Nice’ describes human addiction to social media and the affirmation we receive or don’t from people ‘liking’ our content. The song’s title is a bit of a joke, because the chorus hook is ‘Say something nice about me,’ stating the pathetically obvious. The song also attempts to portray the constant negativity and animosity that comes as an obvious outgrowth of the experience. ‘There nothing I like about me’ becomes ‘There’s nothing I like about you’ in the second verse.”

Peter Block has overcome a neurological condition that left him partially paralyzed in his arms and hands. Following his recovery, Block helped found Weill Cornell Medical College’s non-profit Music and Medicine Initiative, which encourages students to engage in musical performances during their training, and teaches them to integrate the arts into their professional practices after graduation.

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