Who: New Pornographers
Where: Vancouver
What: Indie Rock
Contact info: Joanne Setterington, Indoor Recess, 416-703-5217, joanne@indoorrecess.com.

Ten years after coming together for the first time in the studio to make bright, shiny new music, Vancouver indie rock powerhouse The New Pornographers are still a creative force to be reckoned with.

Challengers, its fourth album, finds principal songwriters A.C. Newman and Daniel Bejar once again making music that is both cerebral and intuitive. This time out it’s also somewhat less frantic than its predecessors.

Challengers has been described as the band’s most organic sounding record to date. A most accurate descriptor, and it certainly applies when describing the instrumentation they went with. They relegated the use of what they describe as “beepy synth” to the back burner, opting instead to go with a sound built on ”real instruments.” Essentially they’ve opted for basic guitar, bass, piano, organ, mandolin, and percussion, augmented, when it seemed appropriate, with a full string section, harp, and flute.

The melodies are bright, infectious and highly memorable, suggestive of the heyday of acts like ELO, Fleetwood Mac. There are nods to Roxy Music and to the The Move, the band both Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne played with before ELO. I can almost hear the influence of Blackberry Way.

Lyrically there are songs about love and sex, hope and joy, good times and not-so-good times.

Much of the album was recorded in Brooklyn, a city Newman has spent a good deal of time in of late and which provided the inspiration for some of the songs here. Other recording was done at band member John Collins’ studio in Vancouver and two other Vancouver studios.

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