“Twin Cinema” is a strong contender for album of the year and my current pick from the fraction that I’ve heard. Broadly speaking, it is in the tradition of late Beatles studio-powered symphonic pop. The songs emphasize catchy melodies, tight structure and complex harmonies, but they balance their sweetness with hard drums and guitar; critics like to call this genre Power Pop.

I first heard the single “Use It” on WPRB and assembled the entire album from LimeWire downloads soon after. None of the fourteen tracks are throwaways, and with two songwriters and three different lead vocalists, no one can say the group lacks variety.

“Use It” is unmistakeably a studio creation. Much of the drama is in instruments coming in and out of the mix; one feels the switches being thrown on and off several times in its three and a half minutes.

First there is a spare intro with drum sticks clicking; the fuse has been lit. The rhythm is relayed to a rapidly pulsing bass line, piano comes in, the drums build and swell, and the song begins, carried along by a loping step-crash rhythm.

Two world-weary verses and then the refrain explodes in the middle of a sentence: “If you’ve got something that sheds some light, use it t-o-n-i-g-h-t.” I like the urgency. At the same time, the lyric sounds a little like a role-playing game, an orc asking a wizard to cast a light spell. I like that too.

There are old school piano flourishes interwoven throughout but what really makes the song is the rapid drum fills fluttering like a male stag beetle. A single piano note repeats on the chorus, sitting like a cherry on top of a multi-layered ice cream sundae. Back to the verse, the chorus again and then four more bars of the refrain and the song stops on a dime. It’s a great song for a pick-me-up, a pop hook so amped up it’s like you chopped it up and snorted it.

The New Pornographers can be tight like Spoon, sweet like The Shins and eclectic like The Fiery Furnaces, though perhaps not as endearingly as any. The press is calling them a super-group because their founding members were all in other bands. As with Sleater-Kinney and The Postal Service, the band started out as a modest side project but quickly surpassed the members’ main gigs in popularity. As the good book says, the stone the builder refuses will always be the head corner stone. Side projects typically have goofy names so as not to be threatening to the members of the main band. When they take off, you're stuck with the name. (This one comes from evangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s condemnation of pop music.)

Like Toronto’s Broken Social Scene, also a Canadian collective, the line-up varies a little with each album. Projects like these could spawn the equivalent of fantasy baseball for indie pop. With a little skill, kids could even mash together their own supergroups.

Most people on the web agree the album’s good but not everyone can say without qualification that it is undeniably great, and like them I hold back my highest praise. Rob Mitchum in Pitchfork gives it 9 out of 10, as does PopMatters' Zeth Lundy. Allmusic’s house genius Erlewine gives it 4 and a half stars, saying it falls short of the masterpiece he’d hoped for because it lacks unity, the band sounding too disparate and not enough like a cohesive group. Douglas Wolk in Spin however finds the egolessness nifty.

Does a work require unity to be great? Does a masterpiece require a master behind it? Must an artist have an overall personal style to be of the first rank, a distinctive signature? Kubrick, for example, does not, despite a recurring fondness for the fish-eye lens, nor do certain madcap Costello albums. Aldous Huxley relegates Zola’s novels to second-rate along similar lines, diagnosing a failure to create a persona larger than the individual works.

Dazzling phrases tumble from the bountiful bushel here and there, but if you’re hoping the intriguing notion of a twin cinema is developed as a metaphor of past and present or reality and desire, you’ll be disappointed. Matt Dentler’s comment in the Austin Chronicle that the “arrangements are superimposed on top of melodies so dense you'd think you were experiencing two albums simultaneously” is better than the song's actual lyrics.

On reflection, this isn’t really Power Pop; the lines aren’t clean enough. About a third of it (“Broken Breads”, “Three or Four”) is straining mightily to move into the lost Prog Rock territory where the likes of Rush and Yes once dwelt, though without straying past the four-minute mark for length.

If you like your pop with extra snap and crackle, your ship's come in. That said, the production of “Twin Cinema” might be too crammed for some people. Most of the choruses are piled with as many layers as a Dagwood sandwich. The studio effects can get a little scary, like sparklers on a cupcake, and there’s an unwelcome feeling to certain of the surprises, like finding someone’s dusted your weed. The opener is in this same manic vein, stomping and throbbing, taking sharp turns and shifting in and out of hyperspace with an astral deedly-dum, but there are plenty of mellower tracks towards the end of the album. The band has a softer side that even the tamest Girlhead could get behind. Masterpiece or not, that is one of the benefits of variety.