Carl Newman's Somewhat Brilliant Past
By Mr. Moderator on Feb 4, 2008
Although Carl Newman's musical career has taken off since the formation of The New Pornographers, the band/collective he co-leads with Dan Bejar, Newman's work with his lesser-known previous band, Zumpano, is a mine of semi-precious gems worth seeking out. Here's the opening song from their first album, Look What the Rookie Did. Those of you who still wait for that "difficult" leader of The Left Banke to make a comeback should pay particular attention. Inordinate fans of Jimmy Webb, whose song Zumpano covered, should also sit up by the old Victrola and perk up those ears.
Zumpano, "Rosecrans Boulevard"
Here's another one from the debut that better points to what Newman would excel at a few years later, with the lucious and more dynamic Neko Case taking occasional turns at the mic.
Zumpano, "The Party Rages On"
Beginning to ring a bell or two?
Newman is the other redhead in the above video, a handsome redhead at that, but lacking in Ann-Margaret-like, All-American animal magnetism, wouldn't you say?
I've got most of The New Pornographers' albums, and each one has a couple of strong songs, including songs sung by Newman and the Bowie-esque Art Rock trimmings provided by Bejar. (Bejar's own albums, by the way, leading his band Destroyer, have their moments.) His However, the band rarely kicks it out with either of those two at the mic, and Newman's tempered approach often gets lost in a sea of ELO-isms.
Follow up:
A friend burned me Newman's solo album from a couple of years ago, The Slow Wonder, released under the name A.C. Newman, for some reason. Although as deliberate as his work with The NPs, I felt the softer, more delicate approach brought out the best in Newman's voice, the best since his work with Zumpano, that is.
Zumpano, "Behind the Beehive"
Zumpano, "The Only Reason Under the Sun"
On their second album, Goin' Through Changes, Zumpano (named after the band's excellent drummer) explored their Inner Zombies, bypassing the runners-up mentality of too many Left Banke-worshipping underground rock bands. I feel this album has greater emotional depth than the debut, and it surely has more depth than most of what I hear in those well-crafted, brainiac NPs records. A rock nerd smarter than myself surely knows the history of Zumpano and can update us on this fine little Canadian band from the mid-'90s, but if you like this kind of stuff - and if you want more out of your New Pornographers' albums, I highly recommend tracking down Goin' Through Changes. If all you find is the debut album, there's also plenty to like there as well.
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They are a band I want to like but haven't been able to...
Incidentally, Jason Zumpano, the band's drummer and namesake, is now releasing his own excellent solo records under the name Sparrow.
New Pornographers work best when they pull off the balancing act between Newman and Case’s vocals. “The Laws Have Changed” is the obvious one, where his parts set the table perfectly for her, and I love the trading back and forth on “The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism.” On “Mass Romantic” from the first album and “From Blown Speakers” on the second, they go together pretty perfectly, and the results are great. Their cover of “When I Was A Baby” is another perfect-fit song.
It felt like they got away from whatever alchemy it is that really worked the first two times on Twin Cinema, so it’s never done as much for me. The songs were all still good, but they didn’t have that “it” that Tvox mentions.
Probably as a result, I still haven’t gotten around to picking up Challengers. The song I’ve heard off there so far that I like the best is Bejar’s “Myriad Harbor.” I liked his stuff on the first album, too, but never managed to get into Destroyer when I’ve heard them. Anyone have a song to recommend that might be a good entry point?
Do a test for me. Open 'My Rights Vs Yours' from their current album in a wave editor programme and look at the shape of the waveform.
See how after a minute it just turns into a slab of noise, with no listener headroom? Ugh.
Their failure to understand basic sound dynamics turns their albums from songs into 'test pattern whines', with gives the various instrumental parts no room to breathe.
An album mastered so badly will have wet, lifeless drum sounds with no punch in the mix, no deep thrum in the bass playing and all the high expressive tones in the piano playing removed.
Horrible, horrible stuff. Why they deliberately damage their music to that degree is beyond me, though modern kids seem to be into a complete lack of dynamics in their music, that creates an endless procession of albums and songs that are possible to listen to without anything standing out to hook a listener. (See 'The Crane Wife' for another horrible 'Everything as loud as everything else' example).
If that wasn't a dealbreaker for me, for some reason one of their singers has started affecting a German Drag Queen delivery, which is simply more than I can bear to listen to. ("Entering White Cecilia").
Started? Dude, Bejar has ALWAYS sounded like that. In fact, he dials it back for the New Pornographers compared to his own band, Destroyer.
Furthermore, he wasn't the first one to to affect this kind of accent/voice. On occasion, it reminds me a lot of David Bowie's Hunky Dory, personally.
Have you checked out these Zumpano tracks I've posted? I think you'll be able to better hear what this Newman guy and his pals could do.
Same deal again. Compressed too violently, constantly clips - the first at 4 seconds into the song!
Why current cds are obsessed with squishing a 120 db range down into the top 5 percent of what the cd is capable of is beyond me.
No matter how much listening time i put into cd's mastered this badly, they never reveal themselves to me because silence is preferable to having constant high frequencies blasted at you.
For all the indie rhetoric of the Pitchfork Crowd, all their top artists are mastered just as loudly and as badly as artists on the major labels. Check out the new Crowded House album for a particularly bad example that just sucks all life out of it and turns a 55 minute album into an endless slog.
(Still, that's nowhere near as bad as Crowded House, that had 447 instances in 'Don't Stop Now').
Unfortunately, even with the harmonics recreated normally, the compression of these sort of songs is simply too great to beging with to bring out the instrument separation, but at least it gets rid of the Odd Harmonics that clipping causes.
Basically, each Odd Harmonic created by clipping creates from 3-4 harmonic responses at the same time, and the louder you turn your cd up, the worse it gets, because those harmonics create more harmonics.
Basically, as you play the song loud, there's a random noise field being generated on top of the song that's a is physically-disturbing to how our ears are designed to hear music.
I wasn't so much battling as more exploring and clarifying this for my own enlightenment since i'm deep in the recording process myself.
I thought there were a few musos here and it's useful advice. As a musician, it makes sense to learn what actively turns off a listener to avoid it, especially if it turns your song into aural wallpaper.
These sort of songs are fine in high-noise environments like cars and ipods, but then they're reduced to being the background soundtrack to another activity.
If you prefer foreground listening, like i do, you're out of luck, because i believe 'meh' will be the most common response, which is how i had two previous NP albums and failed to notice the 'Hedwig' affectations of the vocals, because *they weren't holding my attention enough to notice*.
Seems an odd coincidence the first REM and Smashing Pumpkins albums that regular and consistently clipped were 'Monster' and 'Adore', both of which shed their mass audiences and left them as cult bands.
Ah well. There's too many bands around as it is that it's impossible to get noticed. Why should I give anyone else the advantage? I'll shut up and go overdub some mellotron.
It came to mind this weekend when I went back and listened to Fiery Furnaces’ Bitter Tea to see if whether it had grown or still didn’t work for me. For the most part, it was the latter and this time around, I was convinced it was all the squawky synths that were bugging me. They didn’t seem as “up front” on their previous records, which I enjoy a lot more. So is the same phenomenon going on there?
And, to turn it around in the interest of discussion, is there a well-known or respected song or album with a perfect sound dynamic pattern? One that would create some kind of ideal sine or cosine or…possibly tangent? I don’t know, trig was a long time ago now…if you looked at it in one of those wave editor programs?
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