Carl Newman's music, whether with New Pornographers or solo, is typically referred to through the deceptive category of "power pop." But concentrating on simplicity and force alone unfairly deflects attention from the nuance of Newman's approach-- in his lyrics, arrangements, and delivery, there's always much more going on than can be viewed at a distance. Because of the power pop tag, the emergence of Newman's "quieter" side-- best represented by 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder and the Pornographers' overlooked 2007 LP Challengers-- led many to question if, absent the effusive energy, his music was still worthwhile. Wonder's follow-up Get Guilty isn't going to satiate those looking for another Twin Cinema, but it helps solidify the fact-- known to fans for a while now-- that Newman's singularity as a songwriter lies in more than histrionics.
Like Wonder, Guilty has its share of up-tempo tracks, yet its real pleasures are idiosyncratic, revealing themselves the more attentively and often you listen. Newman has himself compared (with tongue at least partially in cheek) late-album cut "The Collected Works" to Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls", yet that bit of self-deprecation elides what happens after the first verse, when the bottom drops out of the song, leaving a piano to briefly dialogue with what sounds like a tiny, dying violin. "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer" is an acoustic rocker with a recognizably whooped-up chorus, but those two titular characters, in Newman's world, are connected by virtue of the fact that they're "all muscle." During the verses of "Elemental", the harmonies of Nicole Atkins (along with Mates of State's Kori Gardner, Guilty's female vocal ringer) provide a subtle, high-register hum behind Newman. Gentle, swirling organs subtly enter the frame to signal that song's slight shift to a refrain, recalling the stately psychedelia of Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom.
Like some of Costello's music, much of Guilty feels like a gambit-- a playful way of unsettling expectations with a fun-house mirror approach to musical structure and a fondness for meta-narratives. Newman, like buddy and collaborator Dan Bejar, has always turned his (and our) attention back toward the process of creating (see also: "The Fake Headlines", "Twin Cinema"). The title Get Guilty is a deliberate wink toward postmodern author Donald Barthelme, and "The Palace at 4 AM" is a meta-romantic homage to the act of writing, nestled inside a life-on-the-road tale. On the stately, cascading album-opener "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve", after singing the song's first lyric, Newman throws us off his path: "That wasn't the opening line, it was the tenth or the twelfth. Make of that what you will."
Because he knows how to imbue them with purpose and drive, Newman's narrative fragments and impressionistic lyrics can work just as well without self-reflexivity. On "The Heartbreak Rides", one of his dozen or so best compositions to date, he sings, in his irresistibly nerdy falsetto: "She led the modern sunset to your window, gestured with a plain-Jane hand, she said 'Let's go.'" We don't get a direct sense of what the adventure entails, but the suggestion alone, like the song, is invigorating, like an unplanned road trip or the anxious rush of a romantic relationship.
Always his own biggest critic, Newman remembers his youthful capriciousness on the string-flecked, nostalgic "Thunderbolts", singing "We played it too green to start, to play it with any art," as the song pushes toward a crescendo that never comes. Perhaps he's remembering the time when it seemed only natural to substitute verse-chorus-verse with the much more satisfying "chorus-CHORUS-CHORUS!!!" and describe his group as mass romantics and new pornographers. Yet like "Thunderbolts", those ironic descriptors-- suggesting that his music inspired awe by appealing to sensations more than emotions-- indicate Newman's modesty more than they define his art. Revisit his earlier records with an ear toward refinement instead of sheer voltage, and the roots of Get Guilty will clearly reveal themselves amidst the clamor.
