Songs packed with melody, surprising lyrical twists, wonderful harmonies, subtly inventive instrumental choices, most of what we’ve come to expect from The New Pornographers is here, but some stuff is missing. As the title suggests The Former Site Of is an album about what is missing, the songs deal in endings, a sense of loss, memories of what once was. It is the band’s most soft spoken and thoughtful record yet. More so even than its predecessor Continue As A Guest, which made a pretty fair claim to that title up until now.
…Guest was made during lockdown when the band, already a fairly atomised undertaking, became unavoidably separated. The paradoxical figure at its heart, A.C. Newman, who now writes all the songs, sings most of them, but would still prefer not to be thought of as the band’s frontman, set up a home studio and began working remotely with the others. Pandemic isolation and boredom soaked into the songs. It was a calmer, more introspective, record and, while The Former Site Of wasn’t made under the same restrictions, it carries this new way of writing into songs that get even more insular and melancholy.
They announced the album in January with ‘Votive’ a meditation on the fragility of life that seemed pretty down tempo by Pornographers’ standards but, thanks to the charging guitar line that comes in half way, turns out to be the album’s closest thing to the power pop thrills that made their name. If you’re missing that fizzing onward rush of the early records and Neko Case belting out something thrillingly opaque well, I have bad news. This is the first NPs album without a big Neko song. She’s still in the mix but her remarkable voice always excels on their most strident tunes and these songs are anything but. Even the saxophone that helped drive the last album makes only a handful of muted appearances. The good news is it’s still a great record, you just might need to spend a little more time with it as it’s not hitting you in the face with shiny hooks and harmonies as much.
Honestly the quieter, sadder, songs are my current favourites, the slow reverie of a man attempting to buy flowers in ‘Wish You Could See Me, I’m Killing It’, the weird zen of ‘Wine Remembers The Water’ and the uneasy mix of celebration and devastation that hovers over ‘Bonus Mai Tais’, a song about drinking cocktails with a friend who has survived cancer, for now. Over the years Newman’s way with melody combined with his baroque lyrical gift has had me helplessly singing along to a string of impenetrable phrases. His songs have usually been opaque, oblique at best, although his approach has softened. Still, even here, in a song that mostly skirts the obvious with mundane observations he gives us “the sidereal doo-wop of the rain, on the skylight”. An obscurely poetic image of the sublime impermanence of life, sung so that it just flows out as easy as those raindrops gather into streams. Nothing more human than loss.
