We all did. You might call The Former Site Of a confessional album, which, as a lapsed Catholic, I mean in the literal sense of stepping into a box and owning up to your sins. Newman often seems to be reciting his lyrics, even incanting them, reverent and repetitive. They have the inescapable rhythms of penance. Riding a crumbling wave of major-key bounce and melancholy harmony on “Spooky Action,” he sings with his bandmates, “Filling my boots with stardust/Filling my pockets up with rocks/Follow the breath of empire, rise and fall.” It’s a moment of nauseous giddiness, where the upside of sinking into the ocean is the vague possibility of renewal through oblivion.
For much of The Former Site Of, Newman sings with a combination of tentative doubt and aggression. He sounds like a fast-talking derelict trying to explain his position. He sounds like a Catholic priest losing his conviction. In fact, that’s exactly what he seems to be on the LP’s first single, “Votive,” which comes on like a dystopian sequel to The Joshua Tree where the streets all have unspeakable names and finding what you’re looking for might be the worst possible outcome. It’s one of the record’s most effective slow builds, one that devastatingly delivers on the premise with a parable about lighting candles and knowing they’ll surely go out. “Hands are cupped around a match/I’m just trying to keep the lights on/With the martyrs, in the tombs/With the saints.”
The meritoriously Stonesy ballad “Calligraphy” has a grand, killer groove and lets in some temporary air—trees “bending with the wind.” Yet Bejar, who served as a Falstaff to Newman’s Prince Hal on previous records, is nowhere to be found on the entire enterprise. His absence is felt; he might have served as a kind of Greek chorus on the entire unsavory business of rock.
So here we stand, 25 years after Mass Romantic, surprised at the outcomes. When Newman sings about trying to keep the lights on, I take him literally. In a recent interview, Case explained that she was functionally broke—no streaming income, no touring revenue during COVID, no way to keep the wheel turning. The interviewer quickly changed the subject, bankruptcy still looming in the air.
From the wry title to the sliding-into-the-sea content, it can feel like The Former Site Of might represent the functional endgame for the New Pornographers. I am not rooting for the end of a band that has brought me sublime memories for half of my life, but if the New Pornographers have to end here, I love their final elegiac gesture. On the title track and closer, as the keyboards register their complaint, the vocals soar aloft: “Oh, our land, oh, our land, it is sinking.” Newman sounds discombobulated. Some memories you can learn to live with, and some you can’t. It goes on for six and a half minutes. Is it better to burn out or fade away? Can you even tell the difference anymore?
