Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3.5 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
It was 2007 and the New Pornographers were dying. Their self-written epitaph and fourth album, Challengers sat in our hands, proof positive that the super group with the once Midas touch had committed a cardinal sin for a power-pop band. They had created a downright boring album that was stuffy in its headiness, stultifying in its nuances and just plain no fun at all. Sure, we all kind of liked that one Dan Bejar tune about New York, but for the most part we were bored and convinced this was the primary reason the emaciated corpse laid before us. What’s more, we didn’t really care. We still had those three glorious offerings of multi-voiced, deliriously catchy POP! We’d be fine and the band could slowly waste away, releasing increasingly dull material until they blinked out of existence long after any of us even deigned to notice. It was okay. It was time.
It’s now 2010 and, what’s this, the long thought passed away Pornographers are strutting down the street, a spring in their step, a smile on their face, a coy look in their eye and a little album called Together in their hands? And what’s this, the first song, ‘The Move,’ opens with a killer cello riff echoed by guitar and bass before a peppy little piano trots to the fore and Carl Newman breaks out his sugar sweet falsetto? And what’s this, Neko Case belting it out on ‘The Crash Years,’ Newman joining her on the refrains and chorus to usher in some joie de vivre whistling? And what’s this, Newman, Kathryn Calder and Case all harmonizing over steroid injected riffing on ‘Your Hands (Together)?’ Well okay then. Yes please, thank you very much and welcome back to the land of the living.
More than just a return to form though, Together is also—however strangely—a further progression in the direction Challengers promised. The album hearkens back to the giddy, candy rush of the New Pornographers’ first three albums while also refining and expanding upon the taxes and mortgages maturity of Challengers. It’s certainly the band’s most sonically dense album, bursting with keyboards, horns and strings galore, but here they pull off all that thickness without sacrificing the gleeful boy-girl hook overloads the band cut their teeth on.
Sure, the highs are never quite as staggering as before and the middle does clump together into a relatively hard to discern mush of New Pornographerness and Bejar doesn’t sneak in with as devastating a deep cut as usual, but let’s face it, we were only expecting ashes in a jar on the mantle this late in the game. Instead our old friend is alive and well. A little weaker from their brush with fate; a few more lines in their face when they smile, yes. But damn, it’s good to have them back, even if we didn’t notice we missed them until just now.
