91. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic (2000)

And now we see the dangers of the New Pornographers, the danger with their one-hundred-percent reliance on melody and arrangement as opposed to musicianship and atmospherics. If an NP song fails, it fails big time--while great New Pornographers is great music, bad New Pornographers is just unbearable. Tracks like "Mystery Hours", "To Wild Homes" and "Breakin' the Law" are almost worthless, their lack of a memorable melody leaving them as three-minute bits of nothing. The musicianship here is so faceless it could have been performed by robots--if there's a "sound" to this album it's big, candy-colored and irritating. Thankfully, there's some great stuff here: "Mass Romantic" has the band's first classic singalong coda, "The Fake Headlines" is another Carl Newman melody brought down from heaven, and "Letter From an Occupant" is four great songs twisted together and crammed into four minutes. Even these songs, though, hold little of interest outside of their melodies and arrangements: I find "Letter From an Occupant" near-unlistenable despite its obvious melodic brilliance. There is no sense of quietness or loudness here: everything is shoved at you at the same volume, and the entire thing just seems like the one-off it was intended to be at the time (which it wasn't, to our good fortune: the miracle record Twin Cinema was five years away). Some good songs, some bad songs, all bad presentation.

MY RATING: 6.5

The New Pornographers - "The Body Says No"

150. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005)

Power pop is probably my least favorite type of music in the world. I like music that, for lack of a better phrase, creates some sort of coherent emotional world--and while that sounds complicated it really isn't. Music, of all the arts, is probably the one that works most on pure emotion. The problem with power pop, to me, is that it neglects everything else music can do in favor of one thing--melodies. That's it. Power pop is the quest for the catchy melody, and nothing else much matters. The New Pornographers are as guilty of this as anyone--I find Electric Version near-unlistenable, and it's a good lesson on what happens when a band neglects everything else in favor of melody. You stand on melody, and you fall on melody. If the melody isn't memorable, the rest of the song is worthless. But I don't know what the hell happened here, because Twin Cinema is, quite possibly, the greatest single collection of melodies on one album in the entire decade. The music--that is, the arrangements, the performances--are pretty middling. There's the neat stuttering part in "Falling Through Your Clothes", and the horns in "Stacked Crooked"--but that's about it. But God, the melodies! I don't know what family member A.C. Newman had to sacrifice to his god to come up with these, but even if it was his only son it was worth it. Surely I'm not the only one who repeatedly thought of Lennon/McCartney when these songs were playing. No other pop group even comes close to this level of melodic invention--each track contains so many gorgeous, intertwining chorus melodies that the level of complexity almost approaches progressive rock at times. Just listen to "Use It"! I count at least four melodies in that track that any other band would have killed to have written. These guys seem to get more acclaim these days for Mass Romantic, but this--this is the one. It even made me like power pop.

MY RATING: 9.5

The New Pornographers -  "The Bleeding Heart Show"