New Pornographers Twin Cinema

"They've shown this on both screens..."

OK, it took a few spins for me to really get into it, but now the New Pornographer's Twin Cinema is one of my favorite albums of the last year.



Links and audio in the complete post.


The album has had good but not universally positive reviews; most of the negative ones seem to concern the fact that it doesn't sound exactly like their last one. (Compare with the negative reviews for NIN's With Teeth, which mostly concerned how it DID sound like their older albums.) The pop hooks on Twin Cinema are buried a lot deeper than they were on Electric Version and Mass Romantic, but I think that's a good thing. In this interview, the group's main writer/singer Carl Newman explains how he deliberately gave Neko Case (the lone female in the band) all slower songs this time around, just because last time she got to sing all the real barn-burners.

One of these (slightly) slower tunes is also my current favorite from the album (I'm sure my "favorite" will rotate through all of the songs on the album eventually, like it did on Newman's solo album from last year, The Slow Wonder). You can download the song here: "The Bleeding Heart Show"