Whiteout Conditions
The New Pornographers’ seventh album is a peppy team effort, rich with new wave synths and closely blended harmonies. It’s their first LP without Dan Bejar, and lacks his stranger inklings.
The New Pornographers have spent their career seesawing between two sides of their collective musical personality, contrasting straightforward peppy, poppy records—Mass Romantic (2001), Electric Version (2003) and 2014’s Technicolor Brill Bruisers—with melodic, less accessible and at times gratuitously weird LPs (2005’s Twin Cinema, Challengers from 2007 and 2010’s Together).
With a krautrock makeover and hints of New Order, the Vancouver octet’s seventh album is their most coherent statement yet – and one of their very best.
The New Pornographers' first release on their own Collected Works label and without longtime mainstay Dan Bejar, Whiteout Conditions continues very much in the same vein as 2010's Together and 2014's Brill Bruisers.
Whiteout Conditions is the first New Pornos album where arrangement is as much of a focal point as melody.
The New Pornographers 'Whiteout Conditions' album review by Owen Maxwell. The full-length comes out on April 7th via Dine Alone/Collected Works Records.