Nearly seven years have passed since the New Pornographers became overnight darlings of indie rock with their debut Mass Romantic. That’s practically an eternity in today’s hyper-accelerated world, which might explain why Challengers finds the Vancouver-spawned supergroup sounding, for the first time, strangely dated. In an era where the orchestral likes of the Arcade Fire [...]

Neko Case is such a good singer that I sometimes wish she didn’t bother with the songwriting. As an interpreter, she’s almost as good as anyone going. Listen to the Everly Brothers’ “Bowling Green” on her first album, The Virginian. Or Hank Williams’ “Alone And Forsaken” on her EP Canadian Amp. Or her rollicking version [...]

Wasting no time getting to the great stuff, the New Pornographers kick off Twin Cinema with a stone-cold killer. That would be the title track, and, as a slanted-and-enchanted dose of lethal anti-pop, the song doesn’t sound like the rest of the band’s third album. Over gloriously off-kilter guitars, ragged-glory bass and whipcrack drums, the [...]

Tucked away at the end of The Tigers Have Spoken, there’s a spoken introduction to the title track, wherein Neko Case sets forth a modest proposal: Tigers should be reintroduced to their natural environment…and the big cats should be fed children. “Tigers are noble and sleek. Children are loud and messy,” Case declares. If a [...]

A.C. Newman is neither a Nobel Prize-winning physicist nor an obscure Krautrock deity, but rather the adopted moniker of Carl Newman, who writes irrepressible songs for Canadian supergroup the New Pornographers and previously fronted the underrated Zumpano. That it has taken a man so gifted this long to make a solo album is a wonder. [...]

Think of your favorite sad-sack album, the one that should come packaged with a prescription for Paxil and stickered with a warning against operating heavy machinery while under its influence. Now behold that album’s polar opposite, the aural equivalent of a party in a can, The Electric Version. The New Pornographers exploded out of nowhere [...]

Where Neko Case’s earlier albums established her as a big-voiced belter who could overpower the listener with her pipes (to these ears a mixed blessing), her third release is a more subtly sophisticated stunner. It’s as if, having reached that fork in the road where k.d. lang split from Patsy Cline, Case decided to soar. [...]

Canadians will claim as our own anyone who has even the most tenuous connection to the True North Strong and Free. A young Ernest Hemingway worked briefly for the Toronto Star? He’s Canadian. Keith Richards was busted for drugs here? He’s Canadian too. William Shatner, who was even born and raised here, has a building [...]

These days, it often seems like expecting an artist to muster enough creativity to fulfill one career is expecting too much. So it says a lot about Neko Case that aside from her own stellar solo work (the most recent example being the exemplary Furnace Room Lullaby), she is able simultaneously to engage in two [...]