Peel back the last twenty years and The New Pornographers are a snapshot of the sort of guitar music that was always going to be too cool for the skinny-jeaned bravado of ‘landfill indie’. The sort of band often pigeonholed by government-issue music journalism: sparse, sprawling, cinematic and introspective. You know the score. Back to those heady days of ‘Pitchfork bands’ and Broken Social Scene. To a time when Arcade Fire still sounded fresh off the press and decades clear of putting out any millennial dad rock. Then again, maybe they always did?
TNP’s ninth album Continue As A Guest sits somewhere amongst their mid-’00s Canadian peers, minus any anthems for the out-of-touch adults of tomorrow. They hark back to a sound that’s difficult to pin down but still managing a timeless stylishness that has done well to outlive some of the journalistic clichés listed above.
Mostly written and recorded by bandleader A.C. Newman in his upstate New York home, Continue As A Guest gives us another lockdown album, albeit late to the party. Reliving days upon days of little to no human contact, TNP reacquaint us with a sort of benign reality. A perpetual limbo that’s void of evolution or progress. It seems hollow on the surface but Continue As A Guest does well to excavate the quiet meaning beneath. Evoking a warm acceptance in solitude and disconnect, its convincing proof of a band still delivering nuances as complex and relatable to the music of their heyday years before.
