A LexisNexis search shows that, over their 15 year run, English-speaking newspapers have called The New Pornographers a supergroup at least 770 times. That doesn’t include much of the music press—like Rolling Stone, which in September announced, “The Canadian supergroup comes together to premiere Brill Bruisers at the songwriting factory for which it was named.” It doesn’t include most alt-weeklies, and certainly doesn’t include the synonyms for supergroup (we’ve called them “power-pop all stars”). It doesn’t include Pitchfork, for whom a Google search of “New Pornographers Supergroup” yields well over 1,000 results, which doesn’t seem like it could possibly be right, but damn if the first 20 or so weren’t all unique pages.
The New Pornographers are terrible at being a supergroup.
Exhibit A: The Million Dollar Quartet only existed for one night.
Supergroups are tenuous. Most of them only exist long enough to record a single album, perform a single show or sell a single run of T-shirts. In the history of supergroups, only Crosby, Stills & Nash (formed 1968) and Asia (formed 1982) have stayed together longer than The New Pornographers. The New Pornographers have been together long enough to go through stylistic changes and emotional shifts.
Brill Bruisers, like the Pornographers earlier work is profoundly more optimistic than Together, the album that preceded it. Brill Bruisers ends a morbid streak for lead Pornographer songsmith A.C. Newman that continued through his last solo album, Shut Down the Streets.
“Those came from a tough time,” Newman said, noting that both his mother and bandmate Kathryn Calder’s mother had died. “My wife was pregnant and I had all the worries that came along with that. But my son was one and a half when we started writing this album. It was time for a celebratory album.”
Mission accomplished.
Exhibit B: For every Traveling Willburrys, there is a whole lot of Asia.
Get more than three successful musicians into a room together and at least one of them is bound to think of the resulting supergroup as a side project to cash in on their names. One is likely burned out from the thing that made him a success. One is gun shy from her prominent band’s explosive breakup.
As a rule, supergroups don’t produce very interesting music.
Yet The New Pornographers have made six albums of consistently rapturous power-pop and are still finding new ways to add gas to a tank that never seems to empty. This time it’s with honest-to-goodness homages to Xanadu. Synths may scream nostalgia more than ambition, but Brill’s decided turn toward the Casio creates an interesting wrinkle for the band. The jumping bleeps and bloops add a kinetic layer to parts that were once just vocal harmonies. The vocal harmonies are still there, but The New Pornographers are the least dependent on them they’ve ever been.
“It taught me how much of music is in the arrangement,” Newman said.
He’ll tell you that Brill Bruisers is one of his favorites, that “The record we made is the record we were trying to. That’s not always how records work.” Rarer still, the band was able to convert a would-have-been-least-favorite track on the album into his favorite one.
“There were points on ‘Champions of Red Wine’ where I thought it wasn’t coming together. It was missing the synths. But then the arpeggiations came in,” said Newman. “Initially, it sounded like Tom Petty.”
Exhibit C: NKOTBSB
Supergroups, by their very nature, are novelty items. They are sanitized, hermetically sealed marketing ploys whose chief product is albums that, within a few years, you forget you’ve bought. Supergroups aren’t things anyone wants you to take seriously.
The most meaningful moments for A.C. Newman are when people take his Pornographers lyrics seriously.
“I wish more people paid attention to the lyrics. ‘Wide Eyes’ is very obviously about something,” Newman said of the rare, less celebratory song on the album. “A woman in Portland came up to me and said she had never heard a song that captured the feeling of having her mother die. It made it worth so much to have made it.”
So, sure, you’ll never read a story about a New Pornographer’s solo work that doesn’t mention their affiliation with a Canadian indie supergroup. They’re just a group of stars on indie labels.
The New Pornographers headline the Pabst Theater Thursday, Nov. 13, at 8 p.m. with openers The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.
