AC/Newman

November 27, 2004

Remember that A.C. Newman review that I promised? Well, of course you don’t, because I never wrote it. Luckily, Mr. Newman brought his touring band to L.A. once again for a little pre-Thanksgiving party. As the primary songwriter for the New Pornographers, Carl Newman has staked claim as one of the foremost practitioners of power-pop. His creative was so teeming, that he had to launch a solo project just to get the excess on wax.

The natural assumption is that the material is b-side caliber fare, and the new band is a poor man’s New Pornographers. That’s really not helped by the touring band demographics, where five dudes and one red headed woman squeeze onto a cramped stage. If you squint, it’s pretty dang close to Newman’s other Canadian supergroup. Bass player Coco Culbertson doesn’t have any of Neko Case’s vocal strength, but she her vocal characteristics are similar and her collaborative harmonies with Carl Newman sound eerily familiar. When Newman leads the group through boppy pop routines like “Miracle Drug” and “On The Table,” there’s not a whole lot separating his two projects. The Slow Wonder features quite a bit more slow material, and numbers like “Come Crash” and “The Cloud Prayer” and their included trumpet solos feel like new territory.

Newman’s strength as a songwriter is his unerring ear for the hook. It’s a tricky, ethereal thing to pin down, but Newman has it, able to write so many catchy parts that he’s able to create sonic dissonance and contrast by slamming them together. The textbook example is “Town Halo,” which is the track guaranteed to get in your head and under your skin. The simple cello riff will chisel itself on your skull, but if that isn’t enough Newman runs a plinking piano line and a massive multi-tracked chorus under and around it, yanking the song apart at its melodic seams.

Newman played every track off Slow Wonder, which runs at a taut 34 minutes on record. He augmented the main set with “Homemade Bombs in the Afternoon,” a b-side from the Matador at 15 set, as well as a song so new that the band still had their parts scribbled in a notebook. The show concluded with the band covering the sweetly sarcastic “All My Hollowness To You” by the Tall Dwarfs and the retro pop of “If You Want Me” by Outrageous Cherry.

As a performer, Carl Newman’s not the most charismatic or physically active guy around, but his songs have such weighty magnetism to them that it’s not hard to end up staring at the stage. I found myself intrigued with just the instrumentation alone, to find that the lonely synth line in “Secretarial” was an e-bowed guitar, for instance. If anything, go see A.C. Newman just to see three dudes whistle in unison on the bridge for “Drink To Me Then, Babe.” Absolutely worth the price of admission.

Posted in From Blown Speakers