Music: Red Hot Cinema

When Carl Newman finally reconvened The New Pornographers late last year to begin assembling the parts that would eventually become Twin Cinema, the band’s stunning third album, there was plenty on everyone’s minds.

The band had toured extensively behind their ecstatically-received sophomore album, Electric Version, and then taken a lengthy sabbatical so everyone could explore their various other enterprises — Newman toured his solo debut, The Slow Wonder; Neko Case recorded her live set, The Tigers Have Spoken; Dan Bejar was recording and touring with his band Destroyer; and John Collins played with a couple of outside bands (The Evaporators, The Smugglers) and co-produced Tegan and Sara’s last album, So Jealous, along with New Porns’ co-producer Dave Carswell.

Collins had some new thoughts concerning the band’s sonic direction; he guided the band through the tumultuous beauty of the Porns’ debut, 2001’s Mass Romantic, and tightened the bolts on the shinier and sleeker Electric Version in 2003, but ultimately left the mixing chores on the latter to master engineer/friend Howard Redekopp.

“I think Howard did exactly what we wanted to do and what I don’t think I could have done (on Electric Version), which is make a really tight sounding Pop record,” says Collins from his Vancouver home. “I had total control of the first one because no one was interested in doing it. I kind of wanted that control again just to be able to mess around with it sonically and not have to answer to too many people. I wanted it to have an adventurous, chaotic sound to it and make the overall album a bit more bizarre and challenging.”

To compensate for Twin Cinema‘s quieter passages, Newman made a conscious effort to bury the needle on the crunchier songs, amplifying the Porns’ newly established range. As songs like “These Are the Fables” and “The Bleeding Heart Show” expose a tender new facet to the Porns’ immaculate Pop presentation, others like “Use It” and the title track tear through the speakers with a commensurate ferocity, like a searing update on the visceral Rock pageantry of early Kinks or The Move.

“To make up for the fact that some of the songs are mellower, we decided that the songs that rock should rock even harder,” says Newman.

“In some songs, we moved in a decidedly more Rock vein. Prog Rock, but Rock nonetheless.”

Regardless of volume, Newman retained one aspect of his songwriting craft on Twin Cinema, namely his uncanny ability to retrieve a song shard from his demo archive and stitch it to another unrelated musical sketch and create a new song from the separate pieces. The brilliant Shins-produced-by-Brian-Eno shimmer of “Falling Through Your Clothes” was created with a chunk of an idea left over from Electric Version wedded to a more contemporary noodling.

“John was doing something on the computer and a part got accidentally looped,” says Newman. “I just heard something weird, so I said, ‘Hey, John, let’s take this two beat part and loop it four times, and let’s take this two beat part and loop it four times and let’s take this one and loop it four times.’ I had some kind of idea in my head what it would sound like but I thought it was messed-up sounding and we didn’t think anything of it. Then we listened to it a couple of years later, and it was interesting to hear something that you had no recollection of doing and doesn’t even sound like something you would make. So I added some more vocals so that it would actually flow and have a syntax. Then I thought, ‘You can’t just have that loop going on for three minutes … that might get a little punishing.’ So I decided to write a song around it and it ended up being one of my favorite songs. I love songs that are strangely catchy.”

“Strangely catchy” is the perfect description for The New Pornographers’ brand of harmonic mayhem. Newman and his collaborators (particularly Bejar), whether in the Porns or on his solo venture, have utilized essentially the same processes to create four distinct yet foundationally similar works that have all somehow captured the attention of a listenership disenfranchised by listlessly programmed radio and splintered by scattershot downloading and playback practices. Of course, it took four albums to steer the Porns anywhere near that assessment and the band’s previous experience hardened them against any potential disappointment.

“I think we’re pretty grounded,” says Newman. “A lot of us have played music for years and nobody cared. We made Mass Romantic and really had no delusions of success whatsoever. We didn’t know if there was going to be a second album or if we were going to play live shows to support it. It just kind of happened. Maybe people can sense that in our music. We’re not contrived … sometimes I’m singing gibberish, but it’s honest gibberish.”

If there is a thread that runs through the fabric of Newman’s work with the Porns or on his own, it is his contortionist’s approach to jamming lyrics into a melody. Newman also admits a certain affinity for Michael Stipe, who maintained early on in R.E.M.’s history that he had little interest in imparting a message with his lyrics, preferring instead to present his voice as simply another musical texture within the whole.

“I feel the same way,” says Newman of Stipe’s vocal philosophy. “I always think of the vocals as some kind of instrument. People can’t understand my lyrics because I bend the words in whatever way they need to be bent so that they fit. Sometimes, I’ll split a two-syllable word into two syllables, and there’ll be like a four second break in between them and people go, ‘What the hell are you saying?’ And I’ll go, ‘Can’t you tell? I’m saying able: a … ble.’

“And from the beginning, I’ve used the word ‘yeah.’ I think I decided early on that was going to be one of the things I did — throw in stupid nonsense words just to fill up the space. It seemed funny to say ‘c’mon’ and ‘yeah’ and ‘hey’ in a song. Now I do it all the time, and I don’t even blink and nobody ever calls me on it. Nobody ever says, ‘Why do you say yeah at the end of sentences so much?’ Because it’s cool to say yeah at the end. It’s like the exclamation point — Let’s go downtown … yeah!”

This article appears in Oct 5-11, 2005.