[Record Review] AC Newman, "The Slow Wonder"

I listened to this album on the way home today to make myself happy. You can find jets and spurts of ebullience in it, almost anywhere you go to look. When the drums or the pianos upswing, they pull you up with them; guitars chatter back and forth avidly with cellos, or with themselves; there are whistles, whoops, and unlookedfor handclaps in the corners. The backing vocals take a discomfiting, even cheeky tack against the main thread of the melody, so that while they don't quite dissonate, they are barbed somehow, and again, this is so they can pull upwards: skyhooks.

But meanwhile, and first of all, the songs present themselves as only hardly gleeful. I took them initially, in fact, for deadpan. On first meeting, the music fronts itself with a flat, metallic, sandeddown kind of singing, doubled against itself so that any wrinkles are pushed out to the sides. A single voice, in a more unadorned style, might carry an intimate host of burrs, pebbles, breaks . . . and yet here (as in the Shins' first album), it's mostly a matter of shimmer, multiplication, and distance. Songs afraid to make eye contact.

But no, the songs are bold enough; they just give up their diffidence over time. And by doing it this way, by shifting the sweetness of what is obviously a sweet, richly instrumented, generous set of songs away from the main voice, AC Newman has packed the pleasure in more firmly somehow. This is pop confection, but it's dense and needs a little gnawing: toffee instead of caramel.

You know it's pop because the main gesture -- the hummable piece -- of every song sounds so different from all the others, and is carried by a different instrument. Electric guitars; whistling; stride piano; horns; voice alone with a rhythm; voice and backing vox. And it's also pop because there is indeed a hummable piece in every single song. And also the glee. The singer doesn't tell you to be gleeful, but it's something that you and the songs can figure out on your own.