Pop psychology Diagnosing the New Pornographers BY KEN MICALLEF

Performing at the recent CMJ Music Marathon in New York, Vancouver sextet the New Pornographers looked like anything but your typically trendy, self-conscious indie-rock band. With nary a chest tattoo or tongue stud in sight you could easily imagine more appropriate roles for the individual New Pornographers than road-worn 30-something rock musicians. Drummer Kurt Dahle wore the usual rock drummer’s T-shirt but his flailing arms and caffeinated stare recalled Jerry Lewis’s Nutty Professor. Keyboard player Kathryn Calder (from the band Immaculate Machine) was pure Nashville in a frilly sleeveless top, while bassist John Collins stood motionless most of the night, hair falling over his face like a dazed sheepdog. Lead singer-songwriter A.C. Newman looked the most out of place, his close-cropped red hair and green-striped T giving him a boyish Opie Taylor charm. Like nerds enjoying adult revenge, the New Pornographers, who headline the Roxy October 11, proved that it is hip to be square.

That thinking also informs their eclectic, often joyous pop arrangements. Newman once explained that he likes Paul McCartney, but only Wings-era Macca, not the Beatles. "It is not that I purposely want to sound like Wings," Newman says from his home in Vancouver. "I was just talking about unintentional influences. Whenever we do something that sounds kind of McCartneyish, it never sounds like the Beatles McCartney, it’s always like the Wings McCartney. It is just an accident."

It’s no accident that the New Pornographers (who also include singer Neko Case and an ever-expanding cast) specialize in smart, well-crafted pop songs with rock and roll at its heart. On their third album, Twin Cinema (Matador), the band summon everyone from the Monkees and Manfred Mann to ’70s Broadway musical Godspell, Genesis, the Stranglers, and even the B-52’s. Vocal hooks and harmonies flow freely, and burly guitar riffs, spot-on rhythmic shifts, and perky new-wave synth melodies all find their spots.

"We are trying to expand as far as possible but still stay within certain rules without turning into a prog band," Newman says. "I have always thought that we used a lot of tricks in our songs. There are little things you can put in songs that people just eat up. Like stopping for a bar, and doing it again. A lot of times we do that unintentionally but they are just little things in music that work.

"Like the guitar hook in ‘Sing Me Spanish Techno,’ " he explains. "That’s what holds the song together. I thought, ‘This song can be really weird, it can have a lot of parts and go a lot of different places,’ but I figured as long as I came back to that insistent guitar hook it would lock it all together in people’s heads."

Newman’s method makes him sound like an old-school Tin Pan Alley or Brill Building tunesmith. "I wanted that song," he says of "Sing Me Spanish Techno," "to be sprawling and asymmetrical, but anchored by some part that was really simple. It just unfolded with different forms, such as that style of bridge, which is another thing I like to do, keeping the melody line simple and repetitive but making the chords move under it. Like if you play the same melody line over a G or a B-minor it changes the feel of it.

"I might sound like I am talking about songwriting from some technical perspective, but I can’t read music. I learned things that work on the street. I still consider myself to be part of the whole indie-rock world of songwriting. Maybe they are all students of songwriting as well. I think everybody has good and bad ideas. The key is distinguishing the good ones from the bad ones."

The New Pornographers + Destroyer + Immaculate Machines | The Roxy, 279 Tremont St, Boston | Oct 11 | 617.931.2000