Plumbiferous Media

Cana­dian band The New Pornog­ra­phers released their fifth LP, Together, on Tues­day. Founded in 1997 by front­man Carl New­man (also known for his solo work as A.C. New­man as well as as a mem­ber of 90s indie group Zumpano), The New Pornog­ra­phers col­or­fully com­bine rock, indie and power pop to cre­ate their own brand of enthu­si­as­tic sound. Together fur­ther devel­ops that sound to cre­ate an engag­ing album which, though not per­fect, is clearly one of The New Pornog­ra­phers’ bet­ter albums.

Though New­man is nom­i­nally The New Pornographer’s lead vocal­ist, the band’s three other singers, all of whom work with the band in between myr­iad other projects, are nearly if not as impor­tant to the band. Through Together, Newman’s impas­sioned tones can be found tying together tracks like the album’s debut, “Moves,” while Neko Case lends the coun­try tint of her voice to the bom­bas­tic “Crash Years.” Kathryn Calder pro­vides skilled con­trast to many of Newman’s emo­tive lines, while Dan Bejar man­ages to make his voice sound simul­ta­ne­ously breathy and full-featured, giv­ing “Daugh­ters of Sor­row” its almost-otherworldly air. For some bands, such an array of vocal­ists would lead to noth­ing more than con­fu­sion. Not so for The New Pornog­ra­phers, which uses each of its tal­ented singers to their great­est poten­tial, cre­at­ing a huge amount of diver­sity through Together

With so many voices con­tribut­ing to Together, it makes sense that the sto­ries told by the album as just as diverse as those telling them. In true New Pornog­ra­phers fash­ion, each track is an abstract take on real­ity, skirt­ing the edge between metaphor and non­sense. Together moves between “Up in the Dark“‘s take on secrecy and dark­ness: “You have secrets but they’re spent / All that kept the lights on when the power went” to “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk“‘s love of the word “byzan­tine.” The album is scat­tered with the excel­lent lines that have dis­tin­guished many of The New Pornog­ra­phers’ best tracks, and it is oth­er­wise filled with thought-provoking (if occa­sion­ally con­fus­ing) lines.

In addi­tion to four vocal­ists, none of whom have a ten­dency to take turns, Together is chock full of com­pet­ing instru­men­tals, from elec­tric gui­tar to vio­lin to synth, all accom­pa­nied by the ever-present but (sur­pris­ingly) sub­dued per­cus­sion. As a result, Together main­tains a very dense sound, mov­ing between dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tions and sec­tions, cre­at­ing an ever-changing sound that rarely becomes stale, yet stalls enough on each clearly defined sec­tion, main­tain­ing a ter­rific level of catch­i­ness to top every­thing else off.

This style does, nat­u­rally have its ups and downs, but thank­fully, excel­lent tracks like “Sil­ver Jenny Dol­lar” are among the major­ity. There are some instances where the extreme den­sity of the sound ends up caus­ing every­thing to run together into a blurry, repet­i­tive mess - namely “My Shep­ard.” But for the most part, The New Pornog­ra­phers are quite suc­cess­ful at keep­ing blur­ri­ness out of indi­vid­ual tracks; unfor­tu­nately, that blur­ri­ness did appar­ently have to go some­where, and as a result, a num­ber of the tracks on Together, espe­cially towards the end of the album, do some­times seem to blur together.

There are no par­tic­u­lar prob­lems with Together. The album in its entirety can be fairly accu­rately gen­er­al­ized, and how suc­cess­ful each track is depends on how well Together’s style was imple­mented over the course of those min­utes in par­tic­u­lar. There is not much diver­sity of sound, but at the same time, the wide array of tools at the band’s dis­posal keep indi­vid­ual aspects of the album quite diverse. There are some excel­lent sec­tions of the album, and a few that are not top notch, but as a whole, Together is a strong and excit­ing album.

This post is tagged 70-79, The New Pornographers