New Pornographers – Challengers
Nearly seven years have passed since the New Pornographers became overnight darlings of indie rock with their debut Mass Romantic. That’s practically an eternity in today’s hyper-accelerated world, which might explain why Challengers finds the Vancouver-spawned supergroup sounding, for the first time, strangely dated. In an era where the orchestral likes of the Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens rule the indie nation, going the straight-ahead route is so 2000.
The Pornographers certainly bring enough weapons to the battle on their fourth album. Led by singer-songwriter A.C. Newman, the collective’s eight members show up toting everything from mandolin, banjo, and glockenspiel to piano, melodion, and French horn. But as adventurous as that sounds on paper, Challengers is an old-fashioned guitar record, and not a very focused one at that. Whether they’re updating the Velvet Underground for the Facebook nation (“All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth”), or paying sunsplashed tribute to summer-of-love pop (“My Right Versus Yours”), the songs sound half-sketched, pleasant enough but rarely paying off.
Considering that even the best tracks here — the swooning, Neko Case-led waltz “Go Places” and the peyote-sunset country ballad “Challengers” — fall just a hook short of being mixtape-worthy, it may be time for the prolific Newman to spend a little more time woodshedding before he hits the studio. For the first half of this decade, works of pure-pop genius seemed to come easy for him. The vaguely underwhelming Challengers leaves you thinking that the landscape has shifted to the point where this undisputedly talented artist is going to have to try harder.