An immensely clever, allusive wordsmith, A.C. Newman seems to see the limits of pure cerebral narrative. Even when surrounded by intricate, puzzle palaces of verbiage, he understands that the pure kick of drums, the preliterate flourish of "ba-da-das" can have a value that is not denominated in words. Moreover, he grasps that words, for all their nominal exactness, can turn slippery and mercurial in the context of a song. There are a lot of numbers in the lyrics to Get Guilty, and you sense that Newman is searching for a sort of precision, a mathematically elegant structure, in his buoyant pop structures.

Get Guilty is Newman's second solo album, following 2004's The Slow Wonder (and a year after the New Pornographers' Challengers). As in The Slow Wonder, Newman practices a spinning plate sort of complexity, juggling big rock sounds on fragile sticks of melody, heaping difficulty upon difficulty, without a single crash (or even a grimace). It looks easy. It sounds easy. It is not.

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Recommended Tracks:
There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve
Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer