A.C. Newman

You might know A.C. Newman better as Carl Newman, the name he uses as lead songwriter for Canada’s premiere indie-rock power-pop supergroup the New Pornographers. (We’re not sure why the initials, which only served to make us momentarily wonder whether he was one of the many other singing Newmans, perhaps Randy, Colin, or Thunderclap.) His new solo disc The Slow Wonder, partly funded by a Canadian government grant, is a stellar argument in favor of civic sponsorship of the arts. An aggregation of hummable, harmonic pop tunes, its individual songs keep replacing each other on the heavy-rotation chart in our heads. (Right now it’s “35 in the Shade,” a singalong whose dreamy keyboard riff sounds like a transplant from Brian Eno’s Another Green World.) We could grumble that the album is too short, clocking in at just over half an hour. But then we just hit “repeat” on the CD player – problem solved.
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