The New Pornographers, or, This Week at PowerPop

will be a mite slow, since I'm going to see The New Pornographers at least once, and maybe twice.




The first show is at Maxwell's, a great club in Hoboken where we've seen Guided by Voices and Superchunk and Holly Golightly. Maxwell's is a small place: maybe 20x50, including the stage. My favorite part, though, is a riser which runs along the house left side of the room: when you're 5'2", you need all the help you can get to actually see the stage. But the sound there is sometimes really bad. At the Superchunk show (October 2002, I'm going to guess), there was a low-level hum for much of the performance. But this was more than made up for by the 7' tall guy pogoing to "Detroit Has a Skyline Too," coming dangerously close to the second electric every time he bounced. My favorite part, though, was his shirt, which said "Big Fun." Big Fun indeed. In a hall plagued by hipsters slagging off the band, he was a breath of fresh and enthusiastic air. (I think someone actually yelled at him, though, which is too bad.) In any case, Maxwell's is a great place to see a show because you (well, I) can usually always see, and you're never more than a few yards from the band. (Nevertheless, I missed the fact that Greg Demos pissed onstage when I saw GBV there, New Year's 98-99. Manager-for-life Pete Jamison told us after the show. "Didja see!?! Didja see!?!") Can't wait to get back to Maxwell's, obviously.

And then Saturday we'd like to go see them at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, a free show in the Celebrate Brooklyn series, as The Kenosha Kid notes. But it would probably mean bringing offspring, and while I don't object to that in principle (my oldest girl's first concert was when she was about 5 weeks old), it might get hairy. Plus, we have a wedding shower that day. But hanging with DeepToej and watertiger and steve simels and TKK is worth a lot, too. We'll be in touch, folks, but it might be a last minute decision, I'm warning you. (I love that this show is being produced "with major support from the Canadian Consulate General in New York," but then that sort of thing amuses me. A government that supports the arts! Oh, those wacky Canadians!)




I recently acquired the new New Pornographers CD, Twin Cinema, which isn't actually being released until mid-August. The title track is excellent, and I'm also quite keen on "Sing Me Spanish Techno." The rest needs to grow on me, but that's always been true of TNP, who were really my first iPod band. I had a bunch of tracks, and when I first listened to them, I thought "okay, catchy, but not earth-shattering." But then they'd come up in the shuffle and my jaw would drop and I'd say, "what's this?" After the iPod confirmed that it was TNP, I agreed that I needed to convert. I haven't come across the immediate gut-punch of "The Electric Version" or "The Laws Have Changed," yet, but I'm confident it's coming.

I blogged about my band crush on TNP here, but I've since received an email which assures me that Case and Newman aren't really married, though they announced it at a concert in 2002. In my defense, the concert reviewer was also competely credulous, and admit it, we love that sort of thing. If it's not true, it should have been.

UPDATE: Oh boogers. Thanks for the heads up, DeepToej.