Elephant dancing: in an age of apathy, an album that dares to say anything is possible

I was listening to the New Pornographers' Challengers (Matador) over and over; at the same time I was reading a pitchforkmedia.com review of the recent box set of Sly & the Family Stone albums. The writer, Jess Harvell, was comparing Sly Stone's time--the murder of civil rights workers; the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy; Vietnam--to ours: "It's perverse to compare body counts in very different wars. But a cynic might argue that we'd need to have a modern-day leader like King or Kennedy before we would need someone to articulate their loss." Harvell threw the story back to his own generation: "If no one thinks they can change the world anymore--and personally, I think that's bullshit--it's because our expectations have been turned to mush, until people my age are almost born suspicious and resigned." And then I realized: That's why I couldn't turn the New Pornographers off. What I was hearing on Challengers was, as a sound, the absolute opposite of what Harvell was saying. It was the sound not of another time but of another life.

Formed in Vancouver 10 years ago by A.C. Newman, Dan Bejar, Neko Case, and others-it's now an eight-person juggernaut--the band has always had its buoyant moments, a sense of humor, a flair for melodrama. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, their "Letter From an Occupant" was the only music I could bear to listen to for a month because it was so full of life, a shooting star coming out of Case's mouth. You could hear how much they loved Roxy Music, the Small Faces, the Move, Oasis. But too often the song titles--"The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism," "The End of Medicine," "Miss Teen Wordpower"--were better than the songs.

Not now. Now the music sails through its own air, one song after another promising that anything is possible. Instead of a demand that the world be changed there is an affirmation that it can be different--and is that less? Again and again, there's a feeling of discovery: That one day does not have to be just like another.

The songs on this album aren't protest songs. There are stray lyrics and titles that hint at refusal, a no to the world as it seems to be (the line "We are the challengers/of the unknown" from the number "Challengers," the title "Mutiny, I Promise You")--but that's not how the songs work. In a rush of enthusiasm and desperation, people hold up signs as they rush by--verses are all but dissolved in the momentum the music generates. The choruses are the signs; it's there that all bets the songs make pay off. As in Fleetwood Mac's blasted "Go Your Own Way," they're made of massed male and female voices--but with a sense not of that song's self-loathing but of revelation.

"I really liked the title," Newman says on the band's website of "All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth." "I thought it was very long and pretentious, not befitting a 3-minute rock song." It may be pretentious on the back of an album; it's not as it happens. With a beat like the Beatles' "Birthday" but harder, drums and organ pulling against each other, the song opens on the run, a cross between a calliope and a roller coaster. Everything in the music is there to get to the crest, where there's a suspension before the next plunge. You hold your breath; it's as if the band itself is drawing it for you.

Even if you're hearing the song for the first time, you can feel this moment coming, and so you tense up for it, ready to catch it. "All those things that go to make heaven and this" was the first line of the song, sung with an effete curl of the lip, and it went right past, signifying nothing. Now the chorus is shouted, that pause at the top. "All of the things that go to make heaven and earth are here," Newman sings. "All of the things that go to make heaven and earth." It's that "are here" that's the thrill; it's the bluntness of the repeated line without those words, making you miss them, that seals what they say. Right here, right now: Tell me this sky, these streets, the way the city walks, the way the country talks, can't be different, can't be changed.

That story is everywhere here: with Neko Case slowly making her way through the title song, as if catching all the regret for a world that refuses to change; in "All the Old Showstoppers," "Go Places," "Unguided." But what you might take away, I think, is no favorite song but a feeling: scales dropping from your eyes, a voice in your own throat struggling to make itself heard, even if at first it's only to yourself.

Greil Marcus is Interview's music writer at large. Stranded, an anthology he edited in 1979, has just been republished by Da Capo.

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