New Pornographers: Mass Romantic : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

They're an unlikely combination, a Vancouver indie supergroup with a retarded name and three lead singers: alt-country chanteuse Neko Case, Zumpano frontman Carl Newman and acid-voiced Dan Bejar, who has released some odd, charming records as Destroyer. Together, though, they've made a striking power-pop album, forty staggeringly catchy minutes of four-part harmonies and Wall of Sound production, exploding with energy and joy. Bejar and Newman's songs marry brainy, elliptical lyrics to melodic tricks borrowed from the Big Star and Cheap Trick arsenals, but the New Pornographers' real secret is their arrangements - a stampeding legion of guitars, organs, hand claps, tambourines and their idiosyncratic voices. Case's "Letter From an Occupant" starts out at full throttle and just keeps getting more intense, lunging, feinting and piling on gigantic hooks. By the time a chorus of kids bellows the end of "Breakin' the Law" (not a cover!), even the band sounds gleefully overwhelmed. (RS 863)

DOUGLAS WOLK