The evolution of New Pornographers hasn’t been measured by changes in their core sound so much as in energy level, with a discography that can essentially be plotted alongside a DJ console’s BPM lever. And since their 2005 masterwork Twin Cinema—an album that perfectly balanced their formative power-pop freneticism with loftier, widescreened ambitions—that lever has been gradually sliding down, with Challengers from 2007 and Together from 2010 emphasizing more patiently paced set pieces that tiptoed the fine line between gracefully decompressing and killing the buzz altogether. But even if such gambles cost them a few ADD-addled admirers along the way, you get the sense the New Pornographers would soldier on at their own leisurely clip even if no one was listening. Because, for the principals involved, the New Pornographers are less a band than a holiday resort, “a vacation from rock'n'roll music, inside rock'n'roll music,” as resident siren Neko Case once put it. And boy, do they ever need it now.
Since the release of Together, the band’s principal songwriters have experienced the highest of highs and lowest of lows: Dan Bejar produced his most immaculate, universally acclaimed Destroyer album to date with Kaputt; conversely, bandleader A.C. Newman and Case each released sobering, uncharacteristically introspective solo records written in the aftermath of deaths in their respective families. So if the previous two New Pornographers records sometimes had a procedural air about them (with each vocalist checking in to collect their three-song rations), the vim and vigor of Brill Bruisers forcefully reasserts just how important and therapeutic the enterprise is to all involved. And that album title is brilliantly apropos for both the song-factory connotations and intimations of violence: here, the New Pornographers resemble not so much a supergroup as a gang, wielding hooks like shivs, guitar riffs like machine guns, and synths like laser beams. The opening title track isn’t just a blown-out bubblegum pop song made from a box full of Bazooka Joes—it’s a swarming, instantly thrusting you into a dizzying flurry of “bo-ba-ba-bo” harmonies coming at you from all sides. The steady beat of latter-day New Pornographers may remain, but it’s delivered with the force of a body check.
While greatly indebted to pop movements of the past—from ’60s psychedelia to ’70s glam to ’80s new wave—the New Pornographers have never felt like a purely retro exercise, their best songs too jacked-up and exuberant to lapse into studious classicism. But Brill Bruisers feels like their most contemporary recording to date, and a great deal of credit for that lies with the person who, historically, has been the one least likely to be mentioned in a New Pornographers review— Blaine Thurier—and fellow keyboardist Kathryn Calder. In contrast to Together’s cello-dramatic sound, Brill Bruisers foregrounds their playing, not to opportunistically recast the band as au courant synth-pop, but to restore the forward momentum that was in scarcer supply on recent records, from the starbursts that propel Case’s daydreamy turn on “Champions of Red Wine” to the zippy oscillations that power Bejar’s triumphant “War on the East Coast” to the meaty tones that lend the authoritative march of “Backstairs” (the band’s most imposing rocker to date) a little extra spring in its goosestep.
Thurier and Calder's elevated roles speak to the more integrated teamwork in effect on Brill Bruisers; while tracklists on past records could be easily segregated by singer, there’s a greater degree of vocal trade-offs and harmonic interplay that heightens the communal, celebratory sense of occasion. And with the Fleetwood Mac attack of “Fantasy Fools”, the delirious “Dancehall Domine”, and Tommy-sized closer “You Tell Me Where”, the New Pornographers deliver the sort of pure pop head rush they haven’t unleashed in years. (Bejar is an especially feisty mood, hurtling himself into his trio of heart-racing contributions like a drunk who’s just found out the wedding he’s at has an open bar—all the while, in true contrarian fashion, showing up to the New Pornographers’ most modernist album yet with a batch of songs that require harmonica solos.) As ever, the exact meaning of the songs are evasive, but their ascendant arcs readily cast them as underdog anthems for whatever great challenge you face.
Within such a maximalist context (not to mention a bulky 13-song tracklist), acoustic-tempered, middle-geared songs like "Marching Orders" and "Wide Eyes" can't help but pale next to the aforementioned showstoppers. But Brill Bruisers' most revelatory, parameter-expanding songs are actually the most stripped-down: Calder’s quick-hit “Another Drug Deal of the Heart” serves the same reprieving function here that Tobin Sprout’s minute-long melodic morsels did on Guided by Voices’ classic mid-’90s records, while Newman’s “Hi-Rise”—boasting a circular harmony assembled from clipped vocal tics—imagines what the posthumous, animatronic line-up of his band will sound like at a 22nd-century intergalactic tiki-bar residency. As legend has it, when recording the New Pornographers’ 2000 debut, Mass Romantic, Newman’s primary instruction to Case was to “sing like a robot”; with the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path.
