Harbour Lights
I really like The New Pornographers and I adore their new album "Challengers" – an inventive exercise in pop-rock classicism but new single "Myriad Harbour" doesn't really do it for me and it's hard to pinpoint why this is the case. The band haven't lost their capacity for concocting fine pop-rock songs but this number doesn't feel the slightest bit like a single. There's no big chorus and very little to really reel the casual listener in aside from a neat chiming lead guitar line. It's not a bad record per-se it just doesn't scale the heights of those prime cuts taken from the band's last long-player "Twin Cinema". Alternatively it could just simply come down to the fact that I generally prefer the band's A.C. Newman penned tracks (Danny Bejar wrote this particular number). This release comes with a couple of extra tracks to soften the disappointment slightly and judging by their quality they must have missed the album cut by a very narrow margin indeed as they're splendid. "Fugue State" is a lovely A.C. Newman penned ballad and "Silent Systems" sounds like a ghostly lost early seventies classic.