The person who alerted me to the fact that the entirety of The New Pornographers' forthcoming album Challengers is now streaming on their MySpace page was worried that he was the last one in the universe to know. Well, now I'm worried I'm the last to know, so I'm telling you, my readers, since probably some of you don't know (probably many of you hate the band) and now you're the last to know.
After one listen, I think they've managed to make it more middling than any of their previous efforts. Mass Romantic, Electric Version, and Twin Cinemas all feature brilliant tracks and some that I find pretty annoying. Nothing on Challengers annoyed me. But nothing thrilled me the way "The Laws Have Changes," "Mass Romantic," "Miss Teen Wordpower," "All for Swinging Your Around," "Twin Cinema," or "Jackie Dressed in Cobras" does. We'll see, though, how I feel after repeat listens.
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Heads in the Sand
I illegally downloaded this album months ago, shrugged, and moved on. That said, My Rights Versus Yours and Myriad Harbour stand up against their best work. The problem now is everybody is so involved with their (excellent) side projects, how much juice is there for New Porn proper? Destroyer, AC Newman, Neko Case, sometimes supergroups just pull apart-- perhaps it's better this way. It's easier to muster razor-sharp energy as a hungry kid, but as a talented solo artist, maybe you're sick of taking power pop direction from some ginger-coiffed Canadian freak. In the words of Destroyer, "Some might say, we've lost the space race, some may say we lost the space race-- another one might say we won."
Posted by Gregorio | August 16, 2007 12:43 PM