The New Pornographers have spent their career see-sawing between two sides of their collective musical personality, contrasting straightforward peppy, poppy records—Mass Romantic (2001), Electric Version (2003) and 2014’s Technicolor Brill Bruisers—with melodic, less accessible and at times gratuitously weird LPs (2005’s Twin Cinema, 2007’s Challengers and 2010’s Together). Their new album Whiteout Conditions breaks the tie, unmistakably throwing its lot in with the former group. It’s a fitting introduction to spring, a blast of synthesizers and harmony and aural smiles. In particular, multi instrumentalist AC Newman’s knack for melodies is on full display: Every song on Whiteout Conditions invites head-bobbing or singing along, and the album’s success stems at least as much from his penchant for experimenting with arrangement and structure. If 2014’s Brill Bruises was the return to more straightforward, listener-friendly power pop after the self-conscious eccentricity of the last three albums, Whiteout Conditions keeps that celebration going in style.
Whiteout Conditions breaks the tie, unmistakably throwing its lot in with the former group. It’s a fitting introduction to spring, a blast of synthesizers and harmonies and aural smiles. While AC Newman’s knack for melodies is on full display here—every song invites head-bobbing or singing along—the album’s success stems at least as much from his penchant for experimenting with arrangement and structure. Verses flow into choruses with such little fanfare, it hardly seems fair to call them choruses. Instead, the songs come off as collages of uniformly important but musically distinct melodic lines
The Fat Angel Sings 