The Former Site Of review
I have a confession to make. Despite being a 26 year old who came of age with YouTube Let's Play videos and Tumblr blogs, I actually have the music taste of a circa-2006 hipster. I listen to more recent music as well of course1 , but most of the music I listen to is firmly rooted in the 1990s/2000s indie rock scene. To justify which I could possibly construct a argument that the technological and cultural factors of that era were particularly conducive to a flowering of multifarious cultural movements and genres (and by contrast, the current ultra-omnipresent social media mediated world really kinda isn't in a bad way), but that's a post for another time. This time I'm just here to do a humble album review.
The New Pornographers are a band with an awkward name to bring up in conversation and also a great indie rock / power pop band with a string of successful and critically acclaimed albums in the 2000s. They've been putting out albums and touring continuously since then, but as just another careerist indie rock band. Things had been cruising along about as well as you can expect for a band of touring musicians in the 2020s when their drummer (who replaced their original drummer in 2014) got arrested on child pornography (!) charges and was immediately fired from the band. You can read the details on the band's Wikipedia page but understandably this rattled them quite a bit.
But they kept their name and released a new album anyway2, and it's actually very good! They avoid the obvious paths of getting too on-the-nose with the band's drama (or about anything else that's going on) or just emulating the sound of their classic albums with no acknowledgement of the present, instead focusing on sharply focused character pieces that reflect the uncertainty of the current times. Together with the characteristically excellent and tuneful arrangements, it's a surprisingly cathartic and compelling listen.
These days lots of long-lived artistic institutions, both pre- and post- internet, are having to deal with the question of how to stay relevant. Many either try to latch on to current-day relevance, frequently getting washed out on the stressful and all-consuming flow of social media, or they just stick to rehashing their familiar hits to a lingering but static audience. In dealing with their horrible crisis and trying to move on, The New Pornographers have found a middle path, one that I hope that they continue to explore.
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Black Country, New Road are excellent.↩
With a different drummer, of course.↩