The New Pornographers -- Together

So it's been a while since my last post--but fear not as I've got a giant store of music that I've been a total slacker about posting on. There should be a solid number of reviews going up in the next week or two, so, hold on tight.

To start it off, The New Pornographers return with a set of tracks that just falls right in line with their last three or four albums. It feels like these are songs they wrote during Challengers, and just never got around to putting them out--which is a good thing if you liked Challengers (which I did)--and a kind of ho-hum thing if you didn't.

The album houses all the signature New Pron sounds--multi-track, man-woman/woman-woman/ man-man harmonies, tambourines, classical beats (Challengers had a Fugue. Together doesn't have anything THAT classical), some classical instruments and excellent, simple guitar and drums fills. Overall, the album is just solid, front to back, and there's really no songs on it that I find myself forwarding through--which is kind of a feat. There are definitely tracks that are better than others, but, I mean, fucking duh.

Neko Case remains at top form. She continues on her last four year track record and pumps out A+ music. Her vocals remain strong and her country-twang is tempered a bit by the other members of the group, which isn't really a good or bad thing, it just kind of... is? Her vocals are elevated by the harmonies in the songs she sings lead vocals on and she adds depth and tambour in those tracks where she provide the harmony.

Overall, the album is a Solid A- to me. The one "failing", if you can call it that, is that there's no iconic song for me on the album. There's no Bleeding Heart Show. There's no, My Rights vs. Yours. And I can live with that--the album is solid front to back, but if there were an iconic song, it would really elevate it to a high A album. There's not a lot of innovation here and there's nothing "new" to the New Pornographers, but I'd rather buy an album and have it be them showing everyone how good they are at doing the thing they come together to do than them going out to left field and doing something totally different.

Album: Together

Artist: The New Pornographers

Rating: 9.2

Best Tracks: Moves, Crash Years, Sweet Talk - Sweet Talk, If You Can't See My Mirrors, We End Up Together, Up In The Dark

Listen if you like: New Pornographers, harmony, Canadian Rock, Pop, Rock