A.C. Newman – Shut Down the Streets

I’m sat here in front of my laptop, caffeine and nicotine coursing through my veins, and I’m thinking about life, death and The New Pornographers. Because the first two are what A.C. Newman’s third album is all about, and the latter…well, that’s self-explanatory. You’ve probably heard the story – within six months, Newman’s mother passed away and his son was born – and from the comfort of his Woodstock shack, he channelled his feelings into a new batch of songs. Hence, Shut Down the Streets. After a career of obliqueness and wit, it’s about time he tackled the big stuff. And, master of songcraft that he is, it turns out those themes suit him well. The last Pornographers album, Together (for my money, the band’s best since Electric Version), hinted at this melancholy, but without being offset by Dan Bejar’s brilliant intellectual whimsy, it’s a path that Carl Newman is able to follow completely on this LP.

Take the (almost) title track, ‘They Should Have Shut Down the Streets’: the first song written for the record, it also makes for a fitting finale with its muted description of an imagined city-wide day of mourning for his mother’s passing . There’s no chorus, just a slow wave of verses building in detail (“All the bouquets piled on the doorstep, and pages filled with crayon hearts that a second grade class had made…”) before a calm instrumental coda brings the record to a quietly triumphant close. The song sounds exactly like the emotions it portrays so carefully, and this delicacy of touch makes for an uniquely touching moment in the Newman catalogue.

The spectral presence of Neko Case on occasional backing vocals means you can almost imagine some of the songs here being given the full-on, up-tempo New Pornographers treatment; lead single ‘I’m Not Talking’ caps stately acoustic thrum with a smooth strings-and-brass fanfare. The melodic twists and turns remain in tact, but added to the lyrical reflection – the bridge sees him counter his own internal monologue by simultaneously stating “I’ve never been close… but I’ve never been far away” – give the song a fittingly confused state of sad joy, and you can almost hear him going through the five stages of grief through the songs five minutes. Conversely, while the lyrics of ‘Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns’ may suffer from a bad case of the shouting-in-a-bucket-blues (“Are we judged here by the things we say, or is it just the noise we make?”), its crunchy shuffle and Lindsay Buckingham-style gossamer fingerpicked bridge sound like vintage Pornos.

Yet even the lighter moments – presumably those written for his son – are shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. ‘There’s Money in New Wave’ is graced with analogue synths and typical New Father Worries (“The kid needs learning, hope that I can give some good advice”), but it’s welded to a suprisingly low-key strumalong. Likewise, the mid-album pairing of ‘Strings’ and ‘Hostages’ can’t help but make the album drag – too much of a good thing, perhaps – with their nursery rhyme-like words of wisdom and restrained musical backings; the sometimes-threatened breakout moment never quite happens, and these songs fail to rise above the rest of the record’s beauty.

While Newman claims to have taken influence from the likes of ’70s smoothie Gordon Lightfoot, the closest comparison I can make is, of all things, with The Shins’ most recent effort. Like Port of Morrow, Shut Down the Streets mixes high-gloss production with some newfound paternally morbid heft to its lyrical content; and, like that album, when it works, it’s blissful. When it doesn’t, it’s boring – but that’s okay. When the grieving ends, and suddenly there’s a new life for you to care for on top of that, sometimes the only way to cope is to make an enjoyable retreat into the mundane and work out your new definition of normality. Some people write diaries, others talk to therapists. Carl Newman has made a record. That helps too.

Listen to Shut Down the Streets