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.
You can’t overlook the voice of Dan Bejar, a nasal yowl that has a captivating way of meandering around a melody, often scrambling its way toward the end of a lyric as his tongue shoehorns more words between the remaining beats. But you might miss what an important service that voice provides to the first six albums…
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).
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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.
You could be forgiven for having given up on the New Pornographers a few albums back. Though the Vancouver group are consistently fine purve...
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.
Newman has said that they were aiming to be the “Krautrock 5th Dimension”, and there’s definitely more of the latter in Whiteout Conditions’ exuberant pile-up of harmonies, hooks and powerpop.