The New Pornographers
Twin Cinema (Matador)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published on Amplifier online

When the most straightforward-seeming songs on a New Pornographers album come from Dan Bejar, you know you’ve walked through the looking glass. But Twin Cinema sees A.C. Newman’s contributions getting more and more experimental and oblique. The best moments seem to draw on the band’s earlier material: Bejar’s staccato, restless “Jackie, Dressed In Cobras” shares its subject (but little else) with Mass Romantic’s “Jackie,” while the supercatchy title track is a holdover from Electric Version and sounds it. The other songs sound so relentlessly convoluted that they have a hard time generating the momentum that drives so much of the best pop music. Like Newman’s solo The Slow Wonder, Twin Cinema lacks the immediacy of the band’s first two albums.

Perhaps that’s a result of the increasing unwieldiness of the New Pornographers themselves; this was a band that started out six strong and has picked up a member with each new album (the new arrival this time is Newman’s niece, singer and pianist Kathryn Calder). Still, there are signs of new paths worth taking, as “These Are The Fables” and “Bones Of An Idol” are both almost art-rock in their sweep, with Neko Case singing in a voice less full-bore than previously but different from her solo country work. That means that she has at least three distinctive voices living in her throat. Why aren’t they using her more?

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