The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
The New Pornographers return with a defiant new album
‘Whiteout Conditions’ does not feature usual member Dan Bejar
On the New Pornographers new album, “Whiteout Conditions,” some things stay the same. The melodic indie rock-meets-power pop vibe is strong. Vocals that jump back and forth between Carl Newman, Neko Case and Kathryn Calder still float above urgent keyboards, guitars and drums.
And in the songs there’s still a sense of defiance, Newman says, whether it’s applied to matters personal, as the New Pornographers have mostly aimed their songs at in the past, or political as Newman says he simply couldn’t avoid for an album written during the wildly contentious
presidential campaign of 2016.
“I wasn’t trying to be political, but it’s hard for politics to not seep in,” says Newman by phone from his home in Woodstock, N.Y., a few weeks before the band kicks off its new tour in Los Angeles on April 12. (The New Pornographers are set to play April 22 at Newport Music Hall in Columbus.) “Especially in a year where it’s sort of all I think about.
“The fear of Trump, which turned into the reality of Trump,” he continues. “And of course this is all the fear of Trump because it was all finished before he won. But that was always in the back of mind, like, ‘Oh, things could get really bad.’”
A song like “High Ticket Attractions,” the first single off the new record, is clearly about the presidential election, Newman says.
“When I sing, ‘This thing could go two ways / Won’t be another exit for days,’ to me that seemed very obvious,” he says. “Like things are either going to be very good or they’re going to be very bad. Like it’s very binary. The choice here is going to have some serious ramifications and it’s going to be hard to back-pedal on.”
Other tracks, such as the title song, remain drawn from the personal or interior life.
“There are songs like ‘Whiteout Conditions’ that were very, very personal songs that were more about just what was going on inside my life,” Newman says. “Dealing with tragedy and not letting the bad things take over your life.
“I feel that’s always been there, a sort of defiance,” he says. “A lot of our songs sound outwardly happy but you listen to the lyrics and they’re sort of sad. I think that’s always been a part of our music.
“There’s a sadness, but you’re completely defiant toward your sadness.”
Newman wrote all the songs on the new record, an accidental turn of events that happened as a result of longtime Pornographer Dan Bejar sitting this one out as he finished a new album with his band Destroyer.
“It was no controversy,” Newman says of Bejar’s absence. “I told him the kind of record i wanted to do, and he said, ‘You know, I feel like I’m writing nothing but weird quiet songs.’ He said, ‘If I had something that I thought would work on the record I would give it to you but I’m just doing this weird thing.’ I thought, ‘OK, that’s fair enough.”
Newman said he took ownership of the songwriting as a challenge to try new things.
“It seemed like an excuse to not be afraid, because you know sometimes change comes whether you like it or not, and you might as well ride with it,” he says.
Song structures on “Whiteout Conditions” ended up simpler than on previous New Pornographers albums, Newman says, a conscious choice that he and bassist John Collins made as they worked demos into finished songs.
“We were into the idea of having things drone, just having a sound that goes through the whole song underneath it,” Newman says. “And when you do that the chord structures have to be similar. There can’t be a lot of weird key changes and left turns and U-turns in the song.
“So that to me was interesting, to write songs and see how far you could move the melody around within three chords,” he says. “On this record I feel like we were making music that sounds a lot more like other music. A lot of rock music is like that, built around three chords.”
Like its predecessor, “Brill Bruisers,” the new record also sought more of an intentional cohesiveness in sound and style, Newman says.
“We never cared about that at all,” he says. “Before that it was, ‘Let’s make some cool songs and we’ll put them all together. Hopefully if we sequence them correctly it will all work.’ But a lot of my favorite bands have albums that have a vibe that runs through them, and I thought, ‘Let’s try that.’”