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"Whiteout Conditions" is the seventh studio album by Canadian indie rock band The New Pornographers. It was released on April 7, 2017, and is the first album not to feature either longtime drummer Kurt Dahle or singer-songwriter Dan Bejar.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 77, based on 18 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
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The New Pornographers have spent their career seesawing between two sides of their collective musical personality, contrasting straightforward peppy, poppy records—Mass Romantic (2001), Electric Version (2003) and 2014’s Technicolor Brill Bruisers—with melodic, less accessible and at times gratuitously weird LPs (2005’s Twin Cinema, Challengers from 2007 and 2010’s Together).
Whiteout Conditions breaks the tie, unmistakably throwing its lot in with the former group. It’s a fitting introduction to spring, a blast of synthesizers and harmony and aural smiles. They sprinkle the album with unconventional touches, but they avoid the self-conscious oddballism of, say, “Spyder,” instead relying on the strength of AC Newman’s writing and the band’s performance. No doubt some of the record’s pop emphasis stems from the recent departure of songwriter/singer/instrumentalist/Vancouver musical generalist Dan Bejar. Though he only contributed a few songs per album, the erstwhile Destroyer leader’s enigmatic lyrics, skewed melodies and unusual singing voice (at times, he seemed to channel three different Dylan phases simultaneously) offset the more accessible tracks, giving each record more texture, if slightly less cohesion. --- pastemagazine.com
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