joegratz.net

2. The New Pornographers, Electric Version (Matador)
[play it on Rhapsody]

This could be the perfect pop record. It’s catchy, it’s smart, and it keeps up the pace right through its last track, “Miss Teen Wordpower.” But though the lyrics are crisp and occasionally witty, this album is great not because of its “wordpower,” but because of how great this music is. The words serve the melodies, and even gorgeous, evocative lines like this fly by, melding completely into the monolithic sound: “Somewhere in the system there’s an open-ended list of all the lies we tell unblinking, thinking, ‘What could we be living?’” The words that make this album great aren’t words at all; they’re the meaningless, uniquely pop-rock “ooh”s “aah”s that Neko Case adds to the ends of phrases on songs like “The New Face of Zero and One” and “Electric Version”. This is probably not great art — this is the band, after all, that began as a fun side project for a group of Vancouver indie rockers. But it’s a pop masterpiece, and a self-aware one.