THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
'Together' (Matador)
Chiming pop choruses and verbal conundrums are the essence of The New Pornographers, a songwriters' alliance forged in Vancouver, British Columbia. Its albums are tucked amid the solo careers and other bands of its eight members, among them A.C. Newman, Dan Bejar (aka Destroyer) and Neko Case. "Together" might be a mildly defensive title for the group's fifth album, should anyone doubt whether the group is fully collective.
Not that it matters. The New Pornographers are effectively led by Newman, who, as usual, wrote most of this album's songs, nine of them. Bejar wrote the three others. The songs they bring to The New Pornographers are their pluralistic ones, made to be shared by men's and women's voices. Newman, Bejar, Case and Kathryn Calder pass around and share the lead vocals and join in chorales of oohs, whoas, bum-bums and la-las. And they're upbeat, at least on the surface, with hearty guitar strums, sinewy cellos, pumping horns and even some whistling.
The New Pornographers' previous album, "Challengers," let misgivings surface in music that hollowed itself out. But through nearly all of "Together," The New Pornographers sound like a smiley, tambourine-shaking united front, revisiting Merseybeat, Motown, folk-rock, the Beach Boys and (with those cellos) Electric Light Orchestra. Nearly all the songs announce themselves with insistent hooks and gallop ahead from there, gathering more instruments as they go. The band exults in the craftsmanship that juggles the accents of triplets in "Your Hands (Together)" and lavishes melody on phrases like "slow to a singalong crawl" or "abysmal and meaningless."
The fractured, nonlinear lyrics don't share the euphoria. The album title is the theme: The word "together" appears in two song titles, "Your Hands (Together)" and "We End Up Together," about a younger brother. The idea of togetherness runs through the songs on the album, which suggest we're all together in a worldwide calamity and tenuously together, on a smaller scale, in romances and families. "You're ruined, like the rest of us ruined," the group sings in Newman's "Crash Years." Bejar's "Silver Jenny Dollar" hopes for love in "a world that's beaten everything black and blue." Love doesn't turn out so well on this album either. The closest thing to an affirmation is a question: "What's love but what turns up in the dark?" When Newman suddenly, and surprisingly, stops being cryptic, it's in "A Bite Out of My Bed," a breakup song with Beach Boys keyboard chords and skipped beats: "A 747 just left with you," he sings.
The music is hearty and sure of itself. It's the kind of pop that, a few decades back, might have sneaked into the Top 40. Now, The New Pornographers treat their retro pop-rock as the one thing they love without any second thoughts, as long as they can lace it with complexities. "Amnesia becomes ambition/Ambition becomes a new sort of charming simplicity," they sing in Newman's "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk." It almost makes sense.
- JON PARELES
THE HOLD STEADY
'Heaven Is Whenever' (Vagrant)
After a performance late Friday night at the Barrel of Fish, Your Little Hoodrat Friend - a cover band dedicated to performing the songs of the Brooklyn band The Hold Steady - left some lyric sheets scattered on Bleecker Street. One, reproduced below, appears to be an original work sloppily imitating the style of The Hold Steady's songwriter Craig Finn, which is typically dense with dialogue, narrative and extra syllables crammed into the meter, as well allusions to old rock records, Roman Catholicism, drugs and locations in the American Midwest. It also appears to pass judgment on The Hold Steady's sixth album, "Heaven Is Whenever," which enlarges the band's poetic bar-band style, redolent of Thin Lizzy and Bruce Springsteen, just a bit.
She said, this band's still doing frumpy? It's craft, but mock-unsophisticated, it's not what the kids this year really mean.
It's got eighth-note riffs with hiccups, and after Sunday Mass and nitrous, it all sounds like the old MTV theme.
So this is Brooklyn bar-band rock? Springsteen in quotation marks? Drop your lighters, hold up library cards instead?
The closed bars in Clayton County, it was two years before irony, and she doesn't think it was only in her head.
I said don't let it confuse you. This band's soulful, it's not playing tricks.
They're staying local and long-term. They've always been writing album No. 6.
She said, Well, then, this band needs more cowbell. This album comes on heartland-sensitive, like Wilco, but delays real gratification till Track 4.
I said, "The Smidge?" That's batting cleanup, like "Iron Man" on "Paranoid," they're doubling lead guitars and doubling back for more.
They've grown up and they've blown up, so on two tracks they're even slow and grandiose, it's called putting your producer to work;
But I told her she should skip them, Finn's best at decent guys who sweat advice, like priests who've seen their friends all go berserk.
I said don't let it perplex you. Hear "Rock Problems": It's rock singer versus rock myth.
This guy digs Jesuits and baseball. 'Cause not everyone can be Mark E. Smith.
- BEN RATLIFF
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE
'Forgiveness Rock Record' (Arts & Crafts)
For most of its run, stretching back a little more than a decade, Broken Social Scene has been a band with a center but no definitive shape. Its active membership ranged from a half-dozen people to three times that many, with alumni shuffling in and out of rotation. This was productive, to a point - all those voices and instruments encouraged the beatific heave - but it often felt like a product of torpid indecision, unsustainable and self-defeating. At some point the band's founders and chief singers, Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, were going to have to turn on the lights and send the stragglers on their way.
"Forgiveness Rock Record" may be the closest they ever get. The first proper Broken Social Scene album in five years, it's a distillation, revolving around the efforts of a resident core, though the door to the guest room swings open with habitual regularity. Recorded in Chicago as well as the band's native Toronto, it was produced by John McEntire of Tortoise, who knows how to hear his way through a haze.
The band still has its fallback mode, a half-soaring, half-stumbling style thick with texture and obscurity. There are still lyrics divorced from any narrative purpose and grooves that fall somewhere between a stomp and a swirl. But the songs average out at about four minutes, and when they stretch longer, as on "World Sick," an anthemic opener, there are rousing choruses to grasp. "Forced to Love" is among this band's most propulsive tunes; "Sweetest Kill" is one of its most wistfully restrained.
Like The New Pornographers, another Canadian indie-rock band with an album out this week, Broken Social Scene has always done well by its female vocalists: Previous members include Feist, Emily Haines of Metric and Amy Millan of Stars, all of whom turn up on "Sentimental X's," an appealingly airy electro-pop track. "Off and on is what we want," they sing, suggesting on-again, off-again relationships (with ex-band members, perhaps).
Given the emphasis on paring down, it feels all the more perverse that this album ends with Drew on an acoustic guitar, warbling an ode called "Me and My Hand." Even in solitude his thoughts suggest a sensual plural.
- NATE CHINEN
c.2010 New York Times News Service