by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“We’re like that pretty girl that no one wants to ask out for some reason,” says Carl “A.C.” Newman, remarking that the New Pornographers are never invited to festivals like last week’s Pop Montreal. Being the lead singer and songwriter for one of Canada’s most acclaimed indie pop bands, and a supergroup at that, it’s fair to wonder why. Such talented singers, songwriters, players and producers as Newman, Neko Case, Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, Kurt Dahle and John Carswell may seem unapproachable now, but they all had humble beginnings.

“I was just thrown into writing songs ’cause I ended up in this joke band and found myself as the singer,” says Newman. “At some point, I really got into Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson and Jimmy Webb and started studying the craft. That’s why my old band Zumpano was so ’60s-inspired.”

Newman’s three albums with the Pornographers, as well as last year’s solo LP The Slow Wonder, have an undeniable classic pop core, with melodies sparking nostalgia for the British invasion of the mid-’60s and AM radio of the ’70s. Yet since the rave reviews started pouring in for the Pornographers’ 2000 debut LP Mass Romantic, Newman and co. have tried to shy away from what he describes as the “summer fun” tag.

“We can never quite escape it,” he says. “You get tired of writing those kinds of songs, but, to a certain degree, I just can’t help it. I have tons of little pieces of songs that I don’t know what to do with because they’re so redundant. Ultimately, we’re trying to fuse pop with some kind of stranger indie aesthetic.”

On the band’s latest, most commercially and critically successful album, Twin Cinema, that stranger aesthetic takes the form of prog—covert prog.

“I’ve never really liked the prog rock of the ’70s ’cause it seems really clumsy to me,” says Newman. “I mean, playing at 11/8 time? That’s just yo-yo tricks. But a lot of Burt Bacharach songs have weird time signatures that are done so seamlessly that they appear to be easy listening music, but they’re not. They’re prog.”

With Destroyer and Immaculate Machine at
la Tulipe on Monday, Oct. 10 , 8 p.m., $22

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