headlessparrot's Full Review: Challengers [Digipak] * by The New Pornographers
There’s an important caveat to be made before I engage in any critical analysis of the three-quarters Canadian quasi-super group the New Pornographers, which is that I like the New Pornographers considerably less than I like the idea of the New Pornographers. This is not to say that I don’t like the New Pornographers at all, because I like them a whole lot – while debut Mass Romantic[1] does nothing for me, both Electric Version and Twin Cinema are indie rock classics.
It’s just that, even as great as they are, they always seemed a whole lot greater in the abstract: the combination of power-pop king Carl (A.C.) Newman, with the quirky songwriting and immeasurable indie credibility of Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, and the alt-rock vixen appeal of Neko Case... well, it seems pretty much like an under-the-radar dream team. But I have two shameful admissions to make. One is that, while I appreciate Dan Bejar’s quirky musical talent, he’s always been just a bit too quirky for my tastes. His bizarre, paragraphical lyrical excursions, and his yelp-y voice have always seemed like a good idea, but they never really pan out as nice as they should. The other is that while I absolutely love Neko Case’s husky barroom-meets-stadium-stage voice, I’ve – despite repeated attempts – never been able to interest myself in her individual body of work. Bejar and Case are sacred cows of indiedom, so it’s worth mentioning this, if only for the benefit of those who might not already hate me.
Because what I really, truly, concretely love about the band is probably reducible to lead Pornographer Newman. Which goes a long way in explaining why I think that Newman’s lone solo outing, 2004’s The Slow Wonder, is as good as or better than the best of the New Pornographers’ discography. And this in spite of the fact that reviews of The Slow Wonder were fairly tepid for such a critical darling, at least to the point where the record has largely been forgotten just four years later[2]. All of this no doubt speaks to the subjectivity of music, or (more probably) to the fact that I have awful tastes in it. But Newman as leader of the New Pornographers appeals to me not just for his own "more-hooks-than-a-bait-shop" approach to songwriting, but because he yanks Bejar into a much-needed relationship with the real world, and provides what is – for me – a contextually appreciable outlet for Case’s wonderful voice.
But none of this explains why the band’s fourth album, the possibly appropriately titled Challengers, is such a disappointment. Nothing about the formula has changed – joyous, quirky, power-pop that’s as catchy as it is complex – and it’s certainly not that the formula has gotten old (power-pop never goes out of style), but Challengers is the one thing that I never thought a New Pornographers album could be: boring. A multitude of critics, upon its release, hailed the album as a "grower." But in doing so, they’ve confirmed my long held suspicion that “grower” is too often just another synonym (see also: tepid, lifeless, dull, dreary) for "boring." Or not. Scan on, intrepid reader.
Let’s be fair, though – boring is a relative term, and it’s difficult to describe any entry in the New Pornographers’ discography as objectively dull, given that their style of power-pop is more or less to be the antithesis of typical modern rock (or perhaps more accurately, the hyper-exaggeration of it – like MOR rock radio on meth). For proof of this, one need only tune their radio to a modern rock station for ten minutes before following it up with a dosage of the Pornographers. Think a taffy-sweet mixture of Cheap Trick and every happy childhood memory you have left. As voxpoptart put it some five years ago, when he first recommended the New Pornographers to me, “they make Fountains of Wayne seem shy and restrained by comparison.” Granted, this is a dated reference (do we all remember “Stacy’s Mom?”), but one that effectively gets to the heart of just how ecstatically hook-filled and exciting the music of the New Pornographers is – even, returning to Challengers, at its most boring.
I’m no doubt guilty of aural relativism here, which is something I’ve argued against in even just the recent past. But sometimes, even when you’re trying not to, you come to expect more from those you love. This is a roundabout way of defending my assignment of Georgie James' Places - a Pornographers-like boy-girl duo whose songs similarly recall 70s power-pop - a better rating than Challengers, despite the fact that Challengers is arguably the better album. But the New Pornographers are the tween to Georgie James’ toddler; they should know better.
Know better than to do what, though? Because here’s the rub: beyond being “boring” (a wishy-washy assertion, highly subjective and difficult to illustrate anyway, not to mention the fact that I’m not totally convinced myself that it’s true), Challengers isn’t really guilty of any crime. In fact, it sounds a lot like the New Pornographers’ other albums – glossy, catchy, and complex power-pop, buoyed by a few idiosyncratic Bejar compositions and snippets of Case’s gorgeous voice (kind of; more on this later). And given that I’m not one to fault a band too strongly for sticking with a formula – especially one as effective as Newman and company have found – I can’t, in theory, find a fault with Challengers. And yet when I listen to it, it just doesn’t feel right. It’s off. It doesn’t do anything for me. Which I guess also means that your mileage may very. And the fact that I love the New Pornographers in general means that you should probably give Challengers a few spins - if you haven't already - regardless of what I have to say about it.
For me, though, Challengers is the perfect inversion of Everclear’s So Much For The Afterglow – where Art Alexakis’s pop-rock pabulum was (at least for that one album) so much more than the sum of its parts, Challengers is just so much weaker than it has any right to be given the strength of its songs. In fact, at least half of the album’s songs are borderline brilliant, and most of the rest are consistently wonderful (even the Bejar compositions, songs I usually have some reservations toward, are dazzling). But as an album, the building begins to crack, the house of cards shows its foundation, and the whole affair – mind-blowing fun in isolation – seems forced. In an age of digital downloads, and slice-and-dice playlists, maybe this is a needlessly semantic argument against Challengers, but it’s one that’s difficult to shake, even if it’s just because the New Pornographers seem like a band interested in the artistic implications of the LP format.
However, I will say this: I think the argument for Challengers as a “grower” is maybe more compelling than I’ve given credit. I often find that writing about an album – especially one for which I already feel a measure of ambivalence – either clarifies or hopelessly confuses my feelings toward it. Hours of thinking about Challengers has (possibly) persuaded me that perhaps it’s not as middling an album as I previously thought. It’s not great by the standards set by the New Pornographers in the past – and it hasn’t “grown” sufficiently to warrant a better rating – but it holds up decently, emblematic of a mid-career holding pattern. Some of the “grower” designation is no doubt the result of Challengers’ low-key delivery. The hooks are there, but they’re more incisive and subtle. See, for example, lead single and album opener “My Rights Versus Yours,” a dramatically rising song whose devastating hook and gleeful narrative structure still somehow manage to sound subdued compared to the spastic jubilance of earlier Pornographer singles. I’ve never been completely sold on the New Pornographers’ attempts at low-key balladry, but if Challengers does one thing effectively, it’s as an argument for the band being a powerful force for balladry as well as balls-out power-pop.
Thankfully, my feelings toward Challengers are not wholly unique. While the record was generally well received, there was a noteworthy contingent of naysayers with whom I’ve aligned myself. Most of who, as it turns out, have offered two primary theories on why Challengers is such a disappointment. The first is that it falters because it’s less of a New Pornographers album than it is a Carl Newman solo record. While I think that there’s something to this – the record is mostly Newman penned, and limited contributions from both have fuelled widespread speculation that Bejar and Case are being phased out of the New Pornographers Universe – the theory ultimately falters, precisely because I was such a huge fan of Newman when he actually was operating as a solo artist. Not to mention that Newman has pretty much always held the lion’s share of songwriting credits, anyway. It’s difficult to suggest (despite the inarguable importance of Bejar and Case), in fact, that the New Pornographers are anything other than Newman’s baby – so much so that I might have argued, had I not actually heard it, that a Carl Newman solo album was mostly redundant.
The other theory, one that is a bit more cynical and applied more often to the band as a whole rather than its body of work, is that the New Pornographers have always been reducible to Neko Case, and Challengers suffers precisely because her appearances on it are few and far between. To quote a friend: “You don’t like the New Pornographers. You like Neko Case. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”
I disagree with the fundamental basis of this criticism. I love Carl Newman’s solo work, after all (which isn’t different from the Pornographers at all), and I rather like Bejar too, if only in theory. So the possibility that the New Pornographers are living and dying by the occasional vocal contributions of Neko Case is pretty silly. After all, she’s featured on no more than half of the band’s songs (if that), and she rarely tours with them. Yet I do think that there’s a kernel of misguided truth to it, at least in regards to Challengers. Playing a prominent role on only two songs (the title track and the sublime “Go Places”), Case’s absence from most of the disc is painfully obvious. And it doesn’t help (or hurt, depending on your perspective) that those two major contributions are arguably Challengers’ best cuts. “Challengers” is a languishing ballad propelled almost solely by the strength of Case’s voice, under which Newman layers his own harmonies and various eccentric accoutrements. “Go Places” operates similarly, alternating between a gallop and a trot, and likewise fuelled by the gorgeous flourish of Case’s vocal apparatus.
Newman and Bejar, for their part, seem to be aware of this problem, which is why they’ve brought in another female voice to compensate. To be fair, Kathryn Calder (who is also Newman’s niece – nepotism is alive and well) has been singing Case’s vocal parts for years on tour, so she’s not exactly a new member. But while her voice is quite beautiful, it lacks the dramatic flair and smoky flavour of Neko’s. The upside of this is that Case has always been a scene-stealer, so Calder’s presence as a backup singer is much appreciated, as on “Unguided,” a six-plus minute tour de force of vocal harmonies, traded lyrics, swirling synths, and intricate instrumentation – all building to a pressingly metronomic chorus and “do-do-do-doo-dah” climax. “Adventures In Solitude” is gorgeous precisely because, as it comes to a rousing climax over the bamboozling interplay of Wurlitzer and mandolin, Calder isn’t just tossing off a half-hearted Case impression, but rather playing to the strengths of her very pretty voice.
Of Bejar’s contributions – you can tell them immediately by his aforementioned yapping voice and curious stream-of-consciousness lyrics – the best is undoubtedly “Myriad Harbours,” an acoustic-meets-electric rocker whose rambling, rattling and breathy verses are juxtaposed by the epic sing-along chorus – just one line repeated, “Look out upon the myriad harbour” – and subtle harmonica flourishes, shaping the stunning melody into existence. “Entering White Cecilia,” meanwhile, could have come straight out of the Spoon playbook, its jaunty guitars fervently bouncing, its internal structure constantly collapsing in on itself, turning inward, stopping and restarting in a brilliant, coy flirtation with convention. But even album closer “The Spirit of Giving” is noteworthy, a curious pop song that’s as sweetly beautiful as it is listener-friendly, as though Bejar were serving up his best take on the signature sound of fellow Pornographer Newman. And while he lacks the decorative flourish of Newman – not to mention the (comparatively) glossy, yelp-free voice – it’s a remarkably adept approximation that speaks to Bejar’s strength as a writer, regardless of his usual eccentricities.
But Newman gets the bulk of Challengers’ songwriting credits – nine to Bejar’s three – for good reason: because, for all of the album’s shortcomings, Newman remains a wonderful crafter of pop songs, and hoarder of superlative (occasionally synonymous) adjectives: pretty, catchy, dense, beautiful, hook-laden, lush, gorgeous, immaculate, and so on. “All The Things That Go To Make Heaven and Earth” sparkles like classic New Pornographers, albeit with a fiery punk-rock twist, jittering with tense energy, and “Mutiny, I Promise You” throbs with crunching guitars and gleeful harmonies, shifting gears with careful abandon – building through the verses and then deliberately deflating for its chorus.
But put it all together, and the result is jarring. Challengers bounces recklessly from idea to idea, never stopping to consider where it has landed; that most of the ideas are good is less important than the frustrating way in which Challengers tries to have things both ways –by indulging in art rock pretensions while maintaining a gooey pop-rock center. It sounds less like the product of a band than of a smattering of great minds working in isolation, awkwardly thrust together for the sake of expediency. In the process, brilliant ideas become merely great ones – neon colours become muted earth tones – and the band’s razor-sharp definition is lost.
It’s tempting, with this in mind, to blame the divided songwriting credits for Challengers’ broad-view blandness. It’s a ridiculous temptation, though, because it’s exactly how the band has operated for the last three albums. Unless – and this is only a pet theory, with no evidence to substantiate it – Challengers reflects a growing chasm between band members. It’s been widely speculated, as I mentioned before, that Dan Bejar and Neko Case are being “phased out,” whatever that means. If that’s the case, perhaps Challengers is the first step in Newman’s planned withdrawal, a cut-off in the collaborative process in favour of members bringing already fully fleshed out songs to the table. The theory only works, I’ll admit, if there ever actually was a collaborative process involved in the New Pornographers – that there was more to things than the single name listed in the liner notes. But if it’s true (and, as much as I love Carl Newman, I hope that it’s not), it might be in his best interest to abandon that staged withdrawal and simply sever ties. Because while the New Pornographers as a cohesive unit trump all, Newman on his own is certainly stronger than a haphazard assemblage of the individual units that make up the New Pornographers. And in a band filled with such strong personalities, there’s a world of difference between the two.
So what have we learned here today? A lot, actually. We’ve learned that relativity is wrong, except when it’s right. And that Dan Bejar benefits from the presence of someone like Carl Newman, jerking him out of the ether and into some relatable musical context. Moreover, we’ve revealed that the relationship between Neko Case and the New Pornographers is apparently symbiotic in nature; each feeds off of the other, to their mutual benefit (and that of the listening public). Most importantly, though, we’ve learned that Challengers is a mediocre album, despite the fact that it’s really not. As a collection of 11 good-to-great individual songs, Challengers is beyond reproach. But when it all comes together, the result is confusingly scattershot, and bafflingly bland – as though the band has contented themselves with a superficial forgery of the things that make the New Pornographers great.
_________________________ [1] – I will concede that it did plenty for others.
[2] – As Metacritic so smugly informs me (after the fact), A.C. Newman’s solo album was actually quite well received. Unfortunately, positive reviews have done nothing to affect its (lack of) longevity. If you take nothing else away from this review (and you shouldn’t), it’s that you should run out right now to purchase The Slow Wonder.
Indie rockers with a sound that pays homage to classic power pop and New Wave, the Canadian band the New Pornographers made a major impact with their ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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