Learn The New Language

The New Pornographers “Darling Shade”

Whiteout Conditions is the first New Pornographers album without two key founding members of the band. Most obviously, it’s the first without any songs written or sung by Dan Bejar. You’d think this would be a big deal, but it’s kinda…not? Bejar typically serves as a foil for Carl Newman – the Han Solo to Carl’s Luke Skywalker, if you will – but this record benefits musically and thematically from a more unified aesthetic, and finds Carl moving into emotional and tonal spaces previously occupied by Bejar on their records.

The bigger change is that the band’s original drummer Kurt Dahle left the group before they toured for Brill Bruisers, and Whiteout Conditions features his replacement, Joe Seiders. They’re both excellent drummers, but Seiders has a tighter groove and an approach to fills that’s more crisply mechanical and less fluid. Seiders presence is the foundation for the aesthetic changes on this record – the chilly synths and spiky guitars, a persistent sense of sublimated panic, rhythms that seem to be endlessly moving forward to nowhere in particular.

Newman has said that they were deliberately drawing on the influence of krautrock “motorik” beats on this record, and finding a way to graft their usual harmonic maximalism to that sort of focused, propulsive tempo. I think that’s most obvious and successful on “Darling Shade,” particularly in the way the music seems to coast on the groove in the chorus. The song resembles some previous Newman songs – most notably “Dancehall Domine” from Brill Bruisers and “Secretarial” from The Slow Wonder – but the rhythmic approach shifts where the emphasis usually falls in his melodies. The beat is more robotic, but the vocal feels less heroic and more vulnerable.

The cryptic paranoia and cynicism in the lyrics seem to have different stakes. In “Darling Shade,” and in most of the others, Carl sounds genuinely rattled by the outside world, whereas he’d come off as merely dismissive or entirely inscrutable in the past. Other songs on the record focus on coping, or escaping, or just finding a way to survive. It’s much darker than the other New Pornos albums, but it’s a welcome shift, and a lot more resonant and relevant to this moment in time than most people would expect from a band that’s been around for nearly two decades.

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