Written by It’s been a quarter century since the mostly Canadian supergroup New Pornographers sprang from the florid imagination of Carl Newman, a pop savant with an angel’s voice and switchblade wit. The Pornos were a slightly miraculous act of manifestation. The “supergroup” appellation began as a self-effacing joke—all the founding members had spent years treading the more obscure waters of ’90s indiedom—but it eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stacked with riotous instant classics—“Letter From an Occupant,” “The Body Says No,” “The Laws Have Changed,” “Ballad of the Comeback Kid”—their first two LPs, Mass Romantic and Electric Version, were runaway fun machines laced with trace amounts of melancholy.
A word-of-mouth phenomenon first issued by tiny Canadian label Mint and then picked up by indie behemoth Matador, Mass Romantic changed their fortunes overnight. Newman, fresh from a power-pop group called Zumpano that had failed to find traction, now found himself with a hit on his hands. Simultaneously, the solo careers of fellow Pornographers Neko Case and Dan Bejar had begun to take flight—Case as maybe the greatest country torch singer of her generation, and Bejar in his cryptic Leonard Cohen-adjacent auteur mode as Destroyer. Things have a funny way of working out. Sometimes you declare yourself a supergroup, and then, suddenly, you look down and you actually are one.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The funny way things work out is something of a leitmotif for the down-on-its luck newest New Pornographers record. The Former Site Of is either an ambivalent album or an album about ambivalence, depending on how you choose to take it. On track after track, Newman threatens to fire up the old fun machine without ever fully committing to pulling the trigger—again and again, his customary musical build-ups fall slack just before the moment of catharsis. He remains cognizant of his capacity for escapism, but is seemingly unpersuaded that escapism is what any of us deserve. Seemingly recorded over an indeterminate amount of time, across an indeterminate number of places—the press materials mention more than a dozen studios—the album’s 10 songs fuse together like a late-in-life-surgery. It’s ELO and ELP and the Cars on lithium. Roxy Music is another ingredient in the strange, gauzy casserole. It’s stylish in an uncomfortable way, like a Stereolab record by way of a hostage crisis.
Beginning with slow-building arpeggiated synths, opener and existential argument “The Great Princess Story” is a handsomely sung duet between Case and Newman that introduces us to the album’s rough and battered world. “It’s quite a view from my deck chair” he sings ominously, taking grim satisfaction at the apocalyptic landscape: “At least all the drinks are free, as free as the trapped can be.” Almost without exception, Newman’s characters on The Former Site Of seem adrift in the claustrophobic byways and cul-de-sacs of our grinding techno-feudal nightmare; consider the Devo-driven “Pure Sticker Shock,” not so much about selling out as it is the incredible cut-rate bargain that a generation put on their souls. The blast craters are everywhere: whole industries laid waste, old pay phones gone the way of the dodo, the flowers of indulgence blooming over everything. These days, as Newman sings, even a supergroup has to find out the hard way: “In a pure sticker shock/At the price on my head/In a pure sticker shock/Thought I’d get more for it.”
We all did. You might call The Former Site Of a confessional album, which, as a lapsed Catholic, I mean in the literal sense of stepping into a box and owning up to your sins. Newman often seems to be reciting his lyrics, even incanting them, reverent and repetitive. They have the inescapable rhythms of penance. Riding a crumbling wave of major-key bounce and melancholy harmony on “Spooky Action,” he sings with his bandmates, “Filling my boots with stardust/Filling my pockets up with rocks/Follow the breath of empire, rise and fall.” It’s a moment of nauseous giddiness, where the upside of sinking into the ocean is the vague possibility of renewal through oblivion.
For much of The Former Site Of, Newman sings with a combination of tentative doubt and aggression. He sounds like a fast-talking derelict trying to explain his position. He sounds like a Catholic priest losing his conviction. In fact, that’s exactly what he seems to be on the LP’s first single, “Votive,” which comes on like a dystopian sequel to The Joshua Tree where the streets all have unspeakable names and finding what you’re looking for might be the worst possible outcome. It’s one of the record’s most effective slow builds, one that devastatingly delivers on the premise with a parable about lighting candles and knowing they’ll surely go out. “Hands are cupped around a match/I’m just trying to keep the lights on/With the martyrs, in the tombs/With the saints.”
The meritoriously Stonesy ballad “Calligraphy” has a grand, killer groove and lets in some temporary air—trees “bending with the wind.” Yet Bejar, who served as a Falstaff to Newman’s Prince Hal on previous records, is nowhere to be found on the entire enterprise. His absence is felt; he might have served as a kind of Greek chorus on the entire unsavory business of rock.
So here we stand, 25 years after Mass Romantic, surprised at the outcomes. When Newman sings about trying to keep the lights on, I take him literally. In a recent interview, Case explained that she was functionally broke—no streaming income, no touring revenue during COVID, no way to keep the wheel turning. The interviewer quickly changed the subject, bankruptcy still looming in the air.
From the wry title to the sliding-into-the-sea content, it can feel like The Former Site Of might represent the functional endgame for the New Pornographers. I am not rooting for the end of a band that has brought me sublime memories for half of my life, but if the New Pornographers have to end here, I love their final elegiac gesture. On the title track and closer, as the keyboards register their complaint, the vocals soar aloft: “Oh, our land, oh, our land, it is sinking.” Newman sounds discombobulated. Some memories you can learn to live with, and some you can’t. It goes on for six and a half minutes. Is it better to burn out or fade away? Can you even tell the difference anymore?
