Jeez, the Georgia Straight just won't leave Carl Newman alone. First we make him suffer through our Best of Vancouver questionnaire and now we've tracked him down in New York to pick his brains for another 20 minutes or so. "What's up with that?" he asks dolefully, as he strolls through the Big Apple with a cellphone stuck to his head. "I'm just walking around Brooklyn," he continues absently. "They got pharmacies except they call them apothecaries. It's the weird little differences you notice." Perhaps if Vancouver's New Pornographers would drop the ball just once, or if Newman would stop providing such amusing and sardonic interviews, then he might finally get some peace. No such luck, of course. The band's most recent album, Twin Cinema, has only built on the extraordinary critical momentum of its previous releases, Mass Romantic and Electric Version. How often does the world's music press shoot its load so ecstatically and unanimously? Newman, who brings his mighty pop conglomerate back home for a show at the Commodore on Friday, offers a fairly glib take on the situation. Perhaps when appreciation of your music becomes a parlour game for the critics, you tend to shrink from the press a little. "I love it when people write about the record and make it seem far more cerebral and intelligent than it actually is," he says.

The Pornographers are in New York attending the CMJ Music Marathon. They've also managed to score the musical-guest spot on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, during which Newman and his bandmates were forced to deal with Lara Flynn Boyle, who simmered with weirdness at the far end of O'Brien's couch, fixing her gimlet eyes on them while they waited for Conan to wrap up a lively interview with The Sopranos' Steven Schirripa. "I asked Conan if she was crazy and he said, 'Yeah,'?" Newman reveals. "It was strange." He wonders if it affected their performance. "Was it good?" he asks. The sound mix wasn't great, but the band was, with stick-twirling drummer Kurt Dahle, in particular, radiating some welcome cockiness on American network television. The band played its current single, "Use It", but naturally had to change the line, "Two sips from the cup of human kindness/And I'm shit-faced." Instead, Newman sang "And I'm replaced." "Pretty conceptual when you think about it," he says, dryly. Yep, but it's also consistent with the band's governing impulse toward high concept. Underneath the hooks, Newman's evasive lyrics, often delivered with frothy glee by Neko Case, have given critics and fans plenty to chew on. Dan Bejar's minatory contributions, meanwhile, are a contra-indicator to Newman's compulsive invention of chord progressions that dissolve right inside the listener's pleasure centres. In keeping with the notion that the project constitutes "Vancouver's indie-rock supergroup", repeated ad nauseum in the press, each Pornographers release feels like a pop record conceived by an alliance of slightly perverse Nobel Prize winners. No wonder the critics fawn.

As with the band's previous records, the race is on to identify the influences that surface in Twin Cinema. Spin weighed in with Squeeze, Sparks, and the Raspberries among others, but Newman is circumspect. "Raspberries?" he grimaces. "I dunno. I think the Raspberries is a name people throw around to be more obscure, instead of saying the Beatles. Sparks, definitely. Eno, Roxy Music… I think it's strange to emulate anything too much, but at the same time, I don't try not to emulate too much." Mention that Newman's previous band Zumpano seemed consumed with writing a song as good as "Care of Cell 44" by the Zombies and he laughs and says, "But it's tilting at windmills. It's like tribute albums. The best you can do is be almost as good as the original. Then again, Lilys had a record called Better Can't Make Your Life Better, which is a total mid- to late-'60s Kinks ripoff, but they just nailed it so well and even added their own thing to it, and it really stands up."

Although he's as much of a music nerd as a good portion of his band's fan base, Newman was not in the Vancouver audience last month when a terrified-looking Brian Wilson was pushed on-stage to have his hem kissed over Smile. "I'm kinda weird about those things," he says softly. "I wanna remember those people the way they were. I don't wanna see Arthur Lee's new Love, or the new Zombies. I went to the Seeds concert [at the WISE Hall last month] and that was kinda depressing." Still, he does bring up legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb on the band's Web site, declaring that "These Are the Fables" is a reach in the great man's direction. Webb's book Tunesmith is an essential read for anybody interested in either adopting or subverting the tools of classic songcraft, Newman explains. "In the book, he's writing this song called 'Problem Child', and he's going through the writing process and you're thinking 'Man, it's terrible.' And after a few chapters he just scraps it and says, 'Let's start again', and I thought that was interesting. He says, 'It's hell being a songwriter; it can be torturous.' And just reading that made me feel better."

"Because being a songwriter is hell for you?" I ask delicately.

"Mmm, no," Newman snaps back. "It's pretty much a cakewalk."

Georgia Straight, September 2005