Prerelease Challengers

I preordered The New Pornographers new album on the special preorder website (let me know if you're going to preorder and I can add your email address and get entered into a contest for presumably amazing prizes). And I listened to the prerelease stream of the new album. And it's really, really prefreakin' good. So very good. Entering White Cecilia with its easy shuffling rhythm? Dan Bejar is quite awesome and I don't regret picking up almost the entire Destroyer discography based almost entirely on a presupposition that it would be as good as his work with the New Pornos. Failsafe, the tremolo guitar song, works very well, referencing Monster-era R.E.M., although I will presumptuously go out on a limb and suggest that this will never end up being the most popular used cd in any record store. The track, The Spirit of Giving, predone as a Destroyer track, shows that the song was good enough to survive the higher production values. And the rest of the tracks are not bad at all. Too bad their preannounced tour dates are not on the East Coast. I just wanted to point out that you could preorder the album, and that I'm ready to pretentatively place it up with the previous three The New Pornographers albums as preeminent present-day pop classics. And make a bunch of prepuns. None of which I pregret.