Tulip Frenzy

It turns out that, A.C. Newman’s Shut Down The Streets was not only the best New Pornographer’s album of 2012, it was also one of the best albums of the year.  As we said in October, “We’re liking Shut Down The Streets almost as much as The Slow Wonder, and a lot more than Get Guilty, which came out in 2009.  After the first two New Porno albums made the world a whackier and far more joyous place, some of the band’s fans reacted to the third album – Twin Cinemas, with its oft-slower, less manic songs — like Andrew Sullivan reviewing the President’s recent debate performance.  But we liked the depth and minor-key melodic shifts, the emotional complexity of that album and what followed, especially on subsequent albums, with songs like “Fortune” and “We End Up Together,” which swapped effervescent irony for psychic nourishment, pop rocks for comfort food.  And so it goes with Shut Down The Streets, which shows a parallel progression from The Slow Wonder that Together showed from Mass Romantic, and is a lot more like “Bones Of An Idol” than “The SlowDescent Into Alcoholism.”

This entry was posted on November 23, 2012 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Music with tags "Shut Down The Streets, A.C. Newman, Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.