A new challenge for a new age

"The New Pornographers rarely grab listeners the first time around" - Cleveland Scene

Say what? I headed over to the local big box retailer after lunch yesterday and treated myself to a physical copy of the new New Pornographers album, Challengers, as a birthday gift. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, because I was kind of split on Twin Cinema, after being blown away by their first two albums. After 2.5 listens over the last two days, I like the new one slightly better than the last one, but not as much as the first two.

As with Twin Cinema, my favorite songs initially are the ones that Dan Bejar sings. It's a lot closer to that album or Carl Newman's solo album The Slow Wonder than classic New Pornographers sound -- more understated and less frenetic. I'm a big fan of the frenetic, but this probably holds up better for repeat listens.

I didn't want to include a copy of the album cover, so here are the NPs performing "My Rights Versus Yours" earlier this week on the Late Show with David Letterman.


I also went to the next-to-last night of San Francisco's International Pop Overthrow Festival at the Red Devil Lounge. This had everything against it: a Tuesday night at my least favorite club in SF (the last time I went there, someone broke my car window) with a bill of seven unknown bands with the one I knew (Bye Bye Blackbirds) stuck in the middle. So naturally I decided that I had to go. The show's circumstances were so wrong that they had to be right!

I've been to a few IPO shows over the years, and I'm convinced that David Bash runs the whole thing as a vanity festival, without any hopes or intentions of reaching the masses. He just gets a bunch of bands that he wants to see in a city, sets up a four or five day "festival" where they all play, and gets to see 40 bands over five nights. If I ran a pop festival, I'd be concerned if people would go see it and stuff, but David Bash runs IPO without any cares about the outside world. IPO is like the anti-Noise Pop. And he's been doing it the same way for nearly ten years, so he must be doing something right.