"Together" - Professional Popular Song

This is a tricky one.

As far as I can tell, The New Pornographers is a Canadian collective put on earth solely to craft the most perfect pop music mankind is capable of. And their batting average in this pursuit is insanely high.

Mastermind and all-around nice guy (probably) A.C. Newman spearheads this crew, which also includes Destroyer's Dan Bejar (the other male voice you hear and the group's loose cannon), three other folks, and secret-weapon and unofficial "Best Female Singer Currently Working" Neko Case.

They've released four full-length albums since forming like Voltron (or perhaps more like Captain Planet -- where Case would most definitely serve as "fire" in that convoluted analogy) in the late 1990s, and this new batch of tunes is as strong as anything they've ever released.

The general consensus on this band is as follows: If you like pop music, there's no way you can't enjoy what The New Pornographers do (double negative!). If they would've formed in the mid-1970s, they'd be at least as popular as Cheap Trick and playing a casino near you. This is exactly how guitar-driven pop music was meant to sound, and the fact that they're relegated to cult status (popular enough to fill a joint like the Rialto, but still not popular enough to get regular airplay on 92.9) while Ke$ha gets to take over "The Simpsons" opening credits is a damaging indictment on our culture as it's currently composed.

But listen to this record and honestly ask yourself this question: Do The New Pornographers move you on a visceral level? Does their music elicit a gut reaction from you?

After you answer that question, ask yourself this: Is that necessarily the level on which this band was meant to be judged?

This is where the review gets tricky. I don't want to make it sound like I believe Newman leads his group of Canadian pixies into a studio wearing lab coats and plastic goggles, where they go about creating pop music with beakers and Bunsen burners. This group approaches their material with care and with a human touch that can't be replicated.

They pull off one of the most difficult feats one can accomplish in any artistic field -- they make the excessively complicated seem simple and natural. They screw around with time signatures and key changes and all the ultra-esoteric pop minutiae that the average listener (read: sane person) couldn't care less about, yet each song sounds like it should've already been created long before The New Pornographers came along.

I mean, just listen to that riff that opens "Moves." How did it take us until 2010 for that guitar part to be released? Or the string part that ties "The Crash Years" together or the wordless outro in "Daughter of Sorrow"-- what were humans doing if we weren't creating that?

But I have yet to crack these guys. What makes them tick, other than the pursuit of pop perfection?

All truly great music comes from an emotional viewpoint. Angry, depressed, lovestuck, lovelorn, giddy, confused -- all songs come from somewhere. Take, for example, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" by Wilco. There's no way a record like that could exist if the person at the center of it wasn't dealing with some serious hurt. Jeff Tweedy never directly addresses what's going on inside that head of his, but the sound he was able to create will live on longer than whatever emotion caused him to create it.

It doesn't even have to be an emotion the songwriter is experience in the first person. I know a guy who writes phenomenal songs mainly from a third-person perspective that resonate just the same as if he were the one burning bridges or setting fire to his adulterous dad's correspondence or picking up the pieces of a broken marriage.

But The New Pornographers seem to be somewhat emotionally inert. The songs sound great. The arrangements and instrumentation are flawless. There is nothing anyone could possibly want to change about them.

And that might be what keeps them from resonating on that gut level.

The New Pornographers are like that kid in high school -- the straight-A Valedictorian who was exceedingly nice to everyone, never got into trouble, and realized two weeks after graduation that they never really connected with anyone (think Diane Court in "Say Anything"). Case occasionally plays the John Cusack role, holding that boombox high and urging these guys to climb out of their shell. But that pursuit of perfection seems to hold these guys back a little. Instead of playing a few wrong notes on the path toward something big, they stay in their groove and churn out their pristine music, safe and sound.

And is it fair to expect them to do anything other than that?

A piece of art can only be judged on what it's trying to accomplish. Obviously, it's futile to use the same grading rubric for "The Godfather" and "Superbad," but Greg Mottola's film achieved exactly what it set out to do -- get some big laughs, remain true to its characters, and create a somewhat realistic portrayal of the end-of-high-school experience.

The New Pornographers occupy a much-needed niche in the current pop landscape. They provide the instructional manual on how these types of songs should be constructed.

But when was the last time you were moved by an instructional manual?

Verdict: It's OK to screw up once in a while, even if you're successful -- hell, especially if you're successful.