Rockers New Pornographers take ‘Whiteout Conditions’ on the road
The title track of the latest New Pornographers album, “Whiteout Conditions,” deals with a bout of depression, getting into fine detail about dosages and inhibitors.
You wouldn’t expect upbeat material from such a subject, but in the hands of the band from Vancouver, it turns into the kind of driving power-pop song you can blast in the car with the windows rolled down.
That’s just how the New Pornographers roll.
“When we did it, we were recording tracks in LA and this was sort of a new song and they hadn’t heard it and I said, ‘Here’s my new song,’ and we just started playing it. So there wasn't a lot of talk about what the vibe was going to be,” says singer-songwriter-guitarist A.C. Newman. “It seemed like we just started playing it and the vibe was self-evident.”
He’s just getting used to the idea of going out and playing it in front of people.
“Having written that song that comes from a bad place, but then you take it and turn it into this upbeat song, and then [play] it on
‘Colbert,’ it all feels very surreal,” Mr. Newman says. “In a very obvious way, there’s a catharsis. It makes me think, ‘Wow, I guess this is how you’re supposed to do it, huh?’ A classic example of someone hands you lemons so you make lemonade.”
This is the seventh album from the indie rock darlings who have rarely faltered since debuting with “Mass Romantic” back in 2000. It’s hard to miss when you have the pop-smarts of Mr. Newman joined with the harmonies of Neko Case and Kathryn Calder.
“Whiteout Conditions,” the follow-up to 2014’s “Brill Bruisers,” marked a change for the band with the departure of drummer Kurt Dahle and the lack of participation of Dan Bejar, who has been dividing his time with his ownproject, Destroyer.
The result is the first New Pornos album where Mr. Newman wrote all the tracks and one where drum machines, in part, drive the rhythms.
“In a lot of ways it was exactly the same, because Dan’s not on it, but he never worked on my songs,” he says. “I would work on his, but he never worked on mine, so for me the part that wasactually working seemed the same, it was just there thatwas an omission.”
As for the drumming, he says the change there was a big part of the driving sound of the record.
“We’d have drum parts thatwere part drum machine and part real drums, just like messing around with drums in a way we never did before because our previous drummer was proprietary about the drums. He didn't want us manipulating or messing with his drums too much. On this record, we just said, ‘Let’s just [mess] with the drums as much as we want now.’”
More lemons out of lemonade.
“When you’re on album seven, the argument could be made that that’s good. You're trying to do something different, so it’s just thrust upon you. Like, OK, this record is going to be different whether we want it to or not, so let’s just go with it.”
The first single from the album is “High Ticket Attractions,” which he has described as being a song about “Trump panic.” It was a rare political foray for the New Pornographers’ frontman, who keeps his Twitter feed lively with politicalupdates and opinion.
“When I’ve tried to write something that is super political, it just doesn’t work,” he says. “Also, for me, it always startswith the music. There’s the melody and the phrasing of the melody and the syncopation of the melody, so I could write like 10 pages of lyrics and go, ‘This is amazing, I love these lyrics, but I wouldn't be able to fit them into the song.’ And I don’t write simple three-chord folk songs where I can just recite my story over top of them. It’s always like, OK, I’m limited to what I can say because I’m limited to a number of syllables here and the vocals are always clipped. When I do write a song that has like a narrative in it, I’m very happy.”
The New Pornographers are on the road now with Austin indie rockers Spoon, a band they’ve known for years that also just released a new album.
“When you’re going to smaller markets, it makes sense to show up with more of a super-bill,” he says. “For us to headline in some of these smaller places, it’s like, ‘I don’t know. Is anyone going to comesee us in this town?’ ”
Both bands became indie rock darlings during the 2000s, when indie suddenly came to the forefront. Does he have any sense that we’re in a post-indierock boom now?
“I don’t know. I think the definition of indie rock has just changed,” he says. “There are a lot of bands that get referred to as indie rock, but they’re not very indie. A lot of it just sounds like mainstream pop, or a lot of it just sounds like R&B, and that’s verycool. If you think of indie rock like it’s the early 2000s and there’s the Pornographers and Spoon and the Shins and Death Cab, arguably we’re past that. Now all those bands and all that music is a sort of classic rock, almost. You have people who are like married and probably have kids who listened to thatwhen they were like 17.”