The New Pornographers

What happens when a nation that was born to run, and to rev engines into the wild frontier, runs into the full stop that is our current social and political climate? The answer, my friend, is somewhere “In the Morse Code of Brake Lights,” as The New Pornographers would have it on their eighth album. There’s a deep climatic unease running through these 11 tracks that’s matched only by the sheer musical glee with which the band addresses the prevailing mood of the moment. It’s an album in which foreboding and bliss somehow go hand in hand—mixing founder A.C. Newman’s nearly symphonic levels of pop arrangement and harmony with a careening quality that feels unsafe at any speed (to quote the famous Ralph Nader phrase that the opening track also borrows). “Sometimes unintentional influences come in, and then after you start to notice them, you start consciously doing it,” says Newman. “I was about two-thirds of the way through the record when I began to notice that lyrically so much of it was pointing toward car songs. The opening track is ‘You'll Need a Backseat Driver,’ and that was a metaphor that seemed to be running through other songs, too. Next to the love song, I feel like the car song is one of the most iconic kinds of songs in pop music, from Chuck Berry to the present. There was so much of that throughout it that I started thinking: ‘Oh, no, there’s too many references to cars on this record!’ And then I thought, no, that's good—people might think it’s a concept album,” he laughs. “Let’s roll with that.” But Newman’s automotive concerns are very different from Chuck Berry’s, or Bruce Springsteen’s. “Of course, because I’m a person with some degree of empathy and it’s 2019, there couldn’t help but be this sort of anger and panic at the state of the world that runs through everything,” Newman says. “And I think that lends itself to the car metaphor. We’re in this vehicle and it doesn’t stop moving and we don’t know where we’re going.” In a time of heightened shared anxiety, maybe it’s better not to know. “I think it was Robert Louis Stevenson who said, ‘Better to travel hopefully than to arrive’—which I basically paraphrase in the first chorus of the first song.” TheNew Pornographers have been road-worthy since their founding in 2000. But there’s no mistaking that, with In the Morse Code of Brake Lights (their second release for Concord, following 2017’s Whiteout Conditions), what has long been referred to as a “supergroup” has actually coalesced into something like, you know, an actual group—one with a regular, solidified lineup, the presence of someone as independently famous as Neko Case as co-lead vocalist notwithstanding.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artist