TORONTO — As long as Carl Newman can remember, fans and media have speculated on the apparently inevitable breakup of the New Pornographers.
Since the band’s 2000 debut “Mass Romantic,” onlookers have wondered how long the New Pornographers could keep supposedly destined-to-depart chanteuse Neko Case, whose solo career has grown with each passing year. Or Dan Bejar, the singer-songwriter responsible for many of the band’s gleaming oddball gems, who’s also maintained a demanding solo career as Destroyer.
So, as the Vancouver-bred so-called supergroup readied their fifth album with the band’s eight members, as usual, scattered across North America, Newman was pleased to find a title equal parts ironic and defiant: Together.
“People have always been predicting our demise,” Newman told The Canadian Press in an interview at a raucous Toronto bar. “People have been saying like: ‘These guys are going to break up anyway, who cares! They’re at the end of it!’
“People started to think we hated each other just because like somebody saw a show and Neko was in a bad mood, or Neko was having monitor problems so people would go: ‘Oh man, she hates being in this band.’
“It’s been going on since the beginning. ... We’ve always been dealing with it. So that was one level of meaning for the title — yeah, we’re still together, and we’re still friends. We’re still pretty tight.”
Tight socially and, of course, musically.
Together, which is in stores now, finds the band revisiting their kitchen-sink maximalism after 2007’s Challengers found the group exploring softer terrain.
From the chugging riff that opens the propulsive Moves to the Black Sabbath-inspired sledgehammer guitar work of first single Your Hands (Together), Together represents a clear departure from the band’s last album.
“I wanted to make more of a rock record just because we’d gone as mellow as I thought we could get,” Newman explained. “We weren’t going to turn into some minimalist freak-folk band. I think on this one, (we thought) let’s just go back to the (stuff) we can do really well, which is this kind of bizarre rock music.”
“I think I’ve noticed, when the band gets together and plays, we fall into a certain kind of music. And sometimes, in the past, I’ve fought it. Like on Twin Cinema and Challengers, the weirder moments — like Jessica Numbers and Falling Through Your Clothes ... I think I was consciously trying to move away from what the band naturally does and do something a bit more interesting.
“On this one, I just thought, let’s just try to do a lot of what we do when we get together. We’re a rock band.”
Even the reliably off-kilter Bejar seemingly got the memo — his three contributions (Silver Jenny Dollar, Daughters of Sorrow, If You Can’t See My Mirrors) are as streamlined and accessible as anything he’s written.
“It’s very true,” Newman said. “I was kind of shocked at something like Silver Jenny Dollar because it seemed a little unlike him. It seems like he’s always changing gears when he writes for us. Like Myriad Harbour ((from Challengers), it’s such a classic Dan song, and yet it’s nothing that he would ever put on a Destroyer record.
“Songs like that kind of make me mad at Dan. It just seems too easy for him. I really feel he just pulled Myriad Harbour out of his ass. I don’t even think he was trying very hard.”