New Pornographers - Electric Version
(Matador)
Although I immediately liked Electric Version upon the first few listens, I had the nagging thought that it was "just ok", that Mass Romantic was better and that much like that album, I'd eventually get bored with it. Having not listened to that album in over a year though, and knowing how befuddled memory can make me, I excavated it from where it lay in my music collection in situ and sat down to test my suspicions. Listening to the Mass Romantic again, though, only belied my suspicions, quelling the little voice that said, "Their last album was much better," and I soon found that the only thing I liked less on the new one was that Bejar sang no backing vocals, a criticism as minor as any. Lying on my bed listening, I realized Mass Romantic was, well, just a lot more simple that Electric Version, which isn't bad for a power-pop album, but all the same, is what led me to get bored with it in the first place.
Even after this revelation though, it took some time to grow on me, and like all acquired tastes, that extra work, work in its most lax of uses—very little pop music requires a Herculean effort—but let's say this lack of lightning-quick immediacy made me put more effort into the album than I normally would have so, while I cannot say whether it was the slight pause that my memory afforded me that made me have to work harder to enjoy this album or, objectively, there are features of Electric Version that make it more challenging than Mass Romantic - that is, I envision an analysis of the albums that that could count hooks, melodic complexity and the like, which I'm positive anyone could undertake if they had the time or inclination, but what I'm trying to say is that I cannot tell you whether it was my own idiosyncratic experience that has made me like this album better or whether truly it is a more developed work from Newman and company.
I know I've mired this review in subjective sludge, but regardless of my personal experience, I can say without a doubt that anyone who likes catchy songs that are extremely well-constructed and that feature great non-direct lyrics—let me take a moment here to praise Newman and Bejar on this front. These are great lyrics, probably the best of which is Bejar's triplet "I stole a page from your book/and a line from your page/and flew into a lesbian rage." I'm still amazed, after a month of listening to it, at the ingenuity of juxtaposing the words "lesbian" and "rage" simply for the fact that "lesbian"'s adjectival form is so universally used as human descriptor. I doubt this turn of phrase has ever been done before, and I am, without exaggeration, giddy and delighted from its use.
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