A.C. Newman, undisputed leader of the New Pornographers, is sitting at a Starbucks in downtown Vancouver, drinking the tallest cup of coffee the franchise provides. It’s 9am, his eyes are bloodshot and he’s sporting at least a few days worth of stubble.
He’s one day away from the start of the band’s latest tour. He’s a month and a half away from the release of their latest album, Brill Bruisers. And as the men and women in business suits hustle toward whatever constitutes their daily grind, Newman is sipping latte, wondering if his band is even relevant anymore.
“Hopefully we’re still relevant,” he says. He scratches the stubble and looks at his band mate and niece, vocalist Kathryn Calder, who’s sitting beside him.
“It’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s hard to be a band for so long. We’ve seen bands come and go. We’ve seen bands burst way ahead of us then fall way behind. And we’ve been just cruising along through the years.”
“Cruising” is maybe not the first word an outsider would think of. They exploded from the Vancouver music scene in 2000 with the unexpected success of their infectious power-pop debut, Mass Romantic, kicking off a stellar run of albums – 2003’s Electric Version and 2005’s untouchable Twin Cinema, still considered their finest work. Solo careers were launched: Neko Case had Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Newman had The Slow Wonder. Dan Bejar had Destroyer. The Pornos signed to Matador Records in 2006, thus affirming their place among the indie rock (or whatever you want to call it) elite.
That was a long time ago, though. 2007’s Challengers was a moodier, more introspective affair, confounding critics and fans expecting more of the brainy, celebratory power-pop they perfected with Twin Cinema. 2010’s Together was celebrated by some critics and long-time fans as a “return to form,” but ignored by virtually everyone else.
The albums suffered not from a lack of quality but from the band’s inability, or disinterest, to adhere to the prevailing trends at the times of their release. Tastes changed. The hype machine moved on and guitar-based music was pushed further out to the fringes while hip hop and EDM storm the frontlines. Relevance? In 2014? Newman’s right to wonder.
•••
But wondering and worrying are two different things. After two weeks of full-time rehearsing with the band for their upcoming tour, he’s feeling very confidant. He has the right to be. The New Pornographers have an ace in waiting: Brill Bruisers, their sixth album, is their sleekest, strangest and arguably most accessible collection of songs in a decade…or possibly ever.
“I think it’s our best record,” Newman says. “When I make a record I never think it’s our best. But everything came off the way I wanted it to come off, which is a rare thing. I’m usually really obsessed with the minutiae – obviously there’s a lot of minutiae that I still obsess over – but in the past, it’s always felt to me like a song is a house of cards. If you move one thing the whole thing will collapse.”
He adds, “There wasn’t much turd polishing on this one.”
The whole gang’s involved: Newman (obviously), Case, Bejar, Calder, John Collins, Kurt Dahl, Todd Fancey, and Blaine Thurier. Black Mountain’s Amber Webber takes a turn in a duet with Bejar on the stunning “Born With a Sound.” It’s an album reeking of confidence, a celebratory record that’s not celebrating any one thing in particular.
The New Pornographers released their fifth studio album, Brill Bruisers on Aug. 26, are appearing at Rifflandia in Victoria on Sept. 13, and returning to Vancouver for two shows at the
Commodore Ballroom, Oct. 3 and 4 (click here for tickets).
Using “Moves”, Together’s lead single, as a launching point, Newman says the band set out to create their version of a party record – lots of rock songs with “choir boy vocals.” He set just one rule for the band when they started working on the record: No ballads.
“Heavy, weird, and melodic I think was definitely what we were shooting for,” Newman says.
Bejar’s “War on the West Coast” is a surrealist pop dreamscape, doused in proto metal. The Neko-led “Champions of Red Wine” rides a single groove, awash in psychedelic flourishes. “Backstairs” begins with a Daft Punk vocal spoof before melting into four-minutes of electro fuzz and glorious three-part harmony.
Then there’s “Brill Bruisers,” the first single and the album’s lead track, kicking off with a vocal hook and cascading melody as gargantuan as anything in their catalogue – this from a band that created “Mass Romantic” and “Bleeding Heart Show” – and a testament to everything that made the New Pornographers great in the first place.
“It had to be big,” Newman says. “That was the only note recorded for like six months. Big! If the song isn’t big, then we fail. I think I knew from very early on that this is Song One. This is going to be a big song for this record.”
The track has earned them some high praise since it was released in June. Pitchfork even named it Best New Track, a feat that’s not lost on Newman, even after 14 years in to a career that’s held very little regard for the zeitgeist.
“It’s like we’re cool again,” he says. “But sometimes they [Pitchfork] piss me off. No one’s opinion should have that much weight. But it’s great if they have weight and they’re in your side. Then you’re like, ‘This is awesome’.”
As the reigning music tastemaker, a bad Pitchfork review can sink a career, while a stellar review can toss artists into whole new arenas of popularity (see: Destroyer’s Kaputt, which the site placed at No. 2 in their Top 50 Albums of 2011, a spot behind Bon Iver). The New Pornographers, like most bands in 2014, rely a great deal on the hype machine. It’s simple, really. It’s a matter of survival.
“That’s the scary part,” Newman says. “That you put out a record, nobody likes it and you’re not a musician anymore. It’s purely practical. I just want to pay the mortgage.”
•••
It’s the following afternoon at the Pemberton Music Festival. Two bands are already on stage. Metric is at one end. Chance the Rapper, hip hop’s latest rising star and darling of the blogosphere, is at the other end, and by far the largest draw of the hour.
In the middle, at the festival’s smallest music stage, roughly 200 fans are waiting for the New Pornographers. There could be more people, maybe less. It’s hard to tell in a venue as wide open as this.
Either way, the crowd is sparse. Fans have clustered at the front of the stage. A few dozen others are spread throughout the beer garden and around the venue. One could view this (and some have) as the grand unspooling of the indie rock era, as it succumbs to the onslaught of hip-hop and EDM.
Then the band comes out – the whole game, minus Neko. They launch into “Brill Bruisers” and it’s even bigger and bolder than it sounds on record.
The crowd lights up and they draw closer to the stage. The Pornos sound huge and it draws more people to the stage. When they launch into “Use It”, three songs later, the crowd has doubled. They’re dancing, and flailing and spilling beer on each other’s T-shirts.
The draw was modest, but it was an honest crowd. The great majority of people here were fans and seemed happy to have them back.
By the final notes of “Bleeding Heart Show,” as mesmerizing a tune as has ever been written by Canadians, it’s all quite clear: The New Pornographers had never gone limp, or stale, or any other adjective to describe the so-called death knell of indie rock. They sound as vital as ever.
•••
The world seems primed for a Pornographic return. After Kaputt, Dan Bejar has been cast as indie rock’s latest cult figure. Neko Case earned a Grammy nomination this year for The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.
Lately, the Pornos’ undervalued works have been the subject of some critical reappraisal.
Back in February, AV Club published a lengthy, passionate essay arguing that Challengers is their best album. In April, music critic Matthew Perpetua, who reviewed Together for Pitchfork, tweeted, “One of my few regrets as a professional music critic is giving [it] a lukewarm review.”
This came months before Brill Bruisers was announced. It, like the AV Club article, came out of nowhere, and even caught Newman by surprise.
“I almost wanted to cry,” he says, half joking. “A Pitchfork writer was essentially asking for forgiveness!”
Relevance, it seems, is not the issue. They’re still in the game. The question is really – can the New Pornographers outdo their past success? Or do they even really care to?
Newman gazes out past the street, past the line of cars still gunning to get to work. He nods. “I can’t really complain. Everyone’s trying to be more popular. Everyone’s trying to do better at their job.”
The he adds, “Whenever people ask, ‘Are you mad that you didn’t become bigger?’ I’m like, ‘We became bigger than I ever thought we’d be’.”
