The New Pornographers Continue As a Guest Review: A Great Leap Inward

The New Pornographers’s Carl Newman is renowned for pairing word salads with great melodies. He’s a virtuoso at pinpointing the perfect succession of syllables to drive his hooks home, but he’s also frequently shown himself capable of writing songs of immense emotional resonance, like the majestic “Go Places,” from 2007’s Challengers. Older and less guarded now—or perhaps just forcibly driven inward by the realities of pandemic life—Newman has, with Continue As a Guest, seemingly put more of his heart than ever before into his art.

With its glassy electro-pop textures and introspective lyrics, Continue As a Guest represents a leap similar to the gentle, folky Challengers. For fans of a band known for its loud, fizzy power pop, it may prove to be equally divisive, but the album reveals new dimensions to Newman and his bandmates, offering them a sustainable path to aging gracefully.

Newman began working on Continue As a Guest alone at his home in Woodstock, NY, and the solitary nature of the project is reflected both in the relative absence of many of the hallmarks of the New Pornos’s music—fuzzy guitars, hyperactive arpeggiators, multi-part guy-girl harmonies—and in the fact that Newman has never written songs quite this direct before. The title track is an especially disarming rumination on outliving one’s prime: “It’s a sun, it’s gonna set, this isn’t quantum shit,” he explains with characteristic cheekiness. The glistening, melancholic track feels anything but flippant as Newman sings about readying himself for “a long fade out,” which may be the most delightfully music nerd-ish aging metaphor ever penned.

You can certainly hear a change in Newman’s approach in both his lyrics and vocal performances. He adopts a glowering lower register throughout much of Continue As a Guest, endowing even the more uptempo songs with a tinge of darkness. It’s especially evident on the thrusting “Last and Beautiful,” which features a paradoxically low-key vocal from Newman, pitched an octave below Neko Case and Kathryn Calder’s harmonies.

The more insular tone is better suited for a Newman solo effort than a New Porno album, whose appeal lies partially in the band’s vibrant group dynamics. But they’ve been trending in this direction for a while now, with Newman taking over as sole producer for the first time on 2019’s In the Morse Code of Brake Lights and Kurt Dahle, Blaine Thurier, and Dan Bejar gradually dropping out of the lineup. (Bejar, for his part, gets co-writing credit on the resplendent “Really Really Light,” as it features a repurposed chorus from an outtake from 2014’s Brill Bruisers.)

But at the stage in their career when most bands are content to just repeat themselves, the unfamiliar palette of Continue As a Guest is a revelation, and certainly doesn’t preclude the other members of the New Pornographers from making their presence felt. Most notably, Zach Djanikian contributes tenor and alto sax on several tracks, expanding the album’s timbre in new and unexpected directions (there’s a whiff of Bejar’s work on Destroyer’s Kaputt in the synergy of Djanikian’s sax and the preponderance of soft keyboard tones).

The New Pornos do conjure some old tricks here and there, like the chugging guitars and Newman and Case’s ping-ponging vocals on “Really Really Light” and “Angelcover,” but the deviations from the norm are what make the deepest impression here. Especially of note, Case takes lead vocals over a swirl of smooth keys and a pulsing bass/sax riff on “Cat and Mouse with the Light,” sounding a bit like she’s singing while strutting down a catwalk.

That track’s chorus—a stuttered “I c-c-can’t stand that you love me”—is classic Newman, with Case delivering a natural, pure vocal, once again demonstrating why her ability to resist embellishment makes her the definitive interpreter of Newman’s melodies. If this is the start of the New Pornos’s long fade out, here’s hoping those faders don’t come down too quickly.