Coming-of-age movies from the 1980s are joyous, singular quests of the ego. This explains their largely teen viewership—it helps to have archetypes to parse while determining your own identity. It can be comforting to hit the prom by proxy in a Pepto-pink tulle puff, or step into the shoes of a glib slacker as he leads a parade through downtown Chicago; it’s means to a self-actualized end.
So it’s notable that, as the New Pornographers inch ever-closer to the sound of a John Hughes soundtrack, they prove to be almost apologetically devoid of vanity themselves. (They still shrug off that they’re a “supergroup” despite A.C. Newman, Neko Case, and Dan Bejar’s considerable individual fame.) Whiteout Conditions packs the most blanket pep of the power-pop group’s seven albums, dense with that particular new wave brand of electronic two-for-one—insistent, tinny arpeggio synths pinpricking rich, sweeping base chords. The album also largely discards lead vocals in favor of closely blended harmonies, the type that practically huddle in their team spirit. This, plus a singularly bright and skipping tempo, creates an almost forcibly energetic mix—but like any 1980s production worth its salt, it betrays a deeper well of desolation. The color white may reflect light, but it doesn’t absorb it.
The balancing act is most apparent in the presence of the default lead Pornographer, Newman, a man who’s earned both a chuckle and our deepest condolences for sticking to this band name for nearly two decades. On Whiteout Conditions’ title track, his high, hardy vocals nudge out ahead of the busy synths and chipper drums to recall a depressive episode; he recounts days spent falling into a resentful hermitude, turning from windowpanes, before clawing his way back toward the light (a sunny day literally helps kick him out of inertia). The tale gets most grim in the chorus, but pivots on the natural buoyancy of Case’s voice. She makes its bitter pill lyric “The sky will come for you once/Sit tight until it’s done” peal like a tourism brochure tagline.
Elsewhere, Newman and Case stake out an uneasy duet in “We’ve Been Here Before,” as a reunited couple that sounds invariably doomed again, though the lilting guitars and hummingbird synths behind them offer a convincing gloss. In the closer, “Avalanche Alley,” they dream of “controlled demolitions” to wipe away the modern barrage of news, disappointments, vilifications. Case sounds near-saccharine here, with an innocent tang to her topnotes.
It’s Case who brings out the playful core of Whiteout Conditions. The group’s last record, 2014’s Brill Bruisers—a brisk, dance-pop nod to the Brill Building—was a turning point for Case’s role in the band. Before it, she’d largely posted up as lead singer in the ballads; onward from the band’s high-water mark 2005 album, Twin Cinema, her presence as a frontwoman felt strongest in the meditative dust-kickers. On Brill Bruisers, she paired her formidable country-folk pipes with swiftly paced electronics, and it felt intuitive from the first notes. On Whiteout Conditions, she sings with a clean minimalism in the comparatively clipped phrasings of pop music. On “This Is the World of the Theater” and “Darling Shade,” her lead moments are soon enough accompanied by Newman, but her gentle tones reel in those choruses, which are the album’s most memorable.
Dan Bejar is missing here for the first time (he was waylaid by the next Destroyer album) and with him go the New Pornographers’ strangest corners. He has often felt like his own island in the band, despite how smoothly integrated his tracks have been; his tongue is just too sharp, even when he seems otherwise pleased. His nasal screeds gave Brill Bruisers its surreal sheen—from envisioning a sprightly apocalypse in “War on the East Coast” to rasping an all-purpose paranoia on “Spidyr”—and have been a beguiling draw from the band’s start. In the absence of his Beat eccentricities, a stevedore, stalwart band remains—another approach to pop, if a slightly less romantic one. But working consistently with your friends, for the pleasure of it, can be a kind of poetry in itself.
