New AND Improved

For my first music music review/rant, I thought I'd talk about a good ol' Canadian band that we all know and love, The New Pornographers. Specifically, their live concert at the Phoenix in Toronto last Sunday.

That they are a 8-person Canadian power-pop super group is interesting, but not fascinating. In fact, I hadn't really heard them until about 2 months ago, when my girlfriend told me they were touring and that she wanted me to take her. If she hadn't, I probably would never have listened to them, which would be a shame because I really love them!

When you hear “8-person power-pop band”, you think, “what the hell do they all do? Take turns?” (And actually, in the case of Dan Bejar, this is true). But really, one of the great things about the NP is the layering to their songs. Their songs are filled with tension build-up and breakdown, caused by the addition of subtraction of the different instruments, or, (my favourite), different vocals. It's beautiful to listen to an album and hear a variety of moods to songs, and different voices singing them. There's 3 main lead singers in the band, 2 male and one female. But there's lots of background vocals with “ahh ahh's”, and “wee oo's”, and “lalas”. I fucking love that shit.

But I digress, this was supposed to be about the live show. This was really a lesson in how an excellent, high-energy band with a huge catalog of songs should perform. Even though this was basically a tour to support Challengers, they played a ton of old stuff too. And not just singles, older obscure songs that are clearly crowd favourites. They really know how to pick a song line-up too, they build you up with the high-energy songs, and slow it down with some of the softer ones, all with little-to-no breaks in between the songs. They are all clearly into the music, really intense. The drummer does some pretty neat tricks twirling his drumsticks (at least he seemed impressed with them), and the singer does this funny thing where he shakes his right knee while he's playing guitar, and there's a neat light-up NEW PORNOGRAPHERS sign in the background.

I don't know how they all fit on the stage, but they they do it without seeming awkward. The only funny thing was Dan Bejat. He's the other male lead singer, who, as far as I can tell, writes and sings lead in about ¼ of the songs. He would only come on stage for the songs that he sings, and then slinks off backstage. Still, it was exciting to see him stumble back on stage in his pink shirt, swigging a Stella, since his songs are my favourites really (Testament To Youth In Verse, Jackie, Myriad Harbour, etc! So weird and wonderful).

There were a few awkward moments in between some songs, since no one in the band really talked to the crowd. There was one time when people were shouting out requests for songs, and Carl said, “we'll play your requests as long as you don't all yell out at once. Ok, go.” And of course everyone yelled out at once. Dan was on the stage at the time, and said, “It's ok, this is a really good song.” And then went right into Testament. Awesome! They ended up playing all the requests anyways, since they played for about 2.5 hours, and then a 4 song encore, and an unprecedented 2 song second encore!

All in all, an incredible show.