At Mount Zoomer
Recorded in the Montreal church owned by the Arcade Fire in a series of long improvisations then cut down to size, Canada’s Wolf Parade deepen their commitment to tight-guitar-synth-pop-grooves and expansive glam-era progressive improvisations. The 11 minutes of “Kissing the Beehive” begins conventionally enough before sprawling out as the album’s obvious closer, while the six minutes of “California Dreamer” tightens the reins ever so slightly, bouncing in exultant glee with shattering guitar chords and elliptical keyboard figures until the chaos settles into songform. There’s a carnivalesque, Brit pop bounce that sends the band on its way, suggesting what the Fratellis might sound like if they weren’t so darned Scottish. “The Grey Estates” and “Soldier’s Grin” pump excitedly with an exaggerated sense of personal fulfillment, a luminous overconfidence that swaggers past to hide their nervous tics. “Fine Young Cannibals” does not in any way recall the band of the same name, but emits from the blurry David Bowie era of *Diamond Dogs* with its glam pedigree nicely updated.
Recorded and engineered by drummer Arlen Thompson, At Mount Zoomer is Wolf Parade’s second album for Sub Pop. Their first, Apologies to the Queen Mary, came out in the fall of 2005 and was described by Uncut magazine as, “frequently appealing.” Singer/guitarist Dan Boeckner: “After Apologies… we wrote about four or five new songs, but we decided to throw them out because they sounded too much like what we’d already done. We could have easily made another Apologies… but what would have been the point?” Instead, the band committed itself to a period of experimentation, recording long improvisational sessions in the Montreal church owned by The Arcade Fire. These tracks were then cut and pasted into discrete compositions. The result is a complex matrix of components and modules that, thanks to the collective efforts of each band member, never feels labored or fussy. From the nimble opening strains of “Soldier’s Grin” to the eleven-minute aggro dirge of “Kissing the Beehive,” they hand authority of the songs around among them with a refreshing absence of ownership. Where Apologies… could be read as a good-natured, sweaty volleyball match between Boeckner and singer/keyboardist Spencer Krug, the new album shows the band as a fully coordinated moving front. This collaboration isn’t just a work ethic—the band’s many offshoots, side projects, and domestic ventures have taken each of them far from their home base in Montreal for extended periods, compressing their time as a functioning unit. “It’s hard enough to get us all in the same room at the same time,” Krug said of the band’s approach, “so when we do get to write songs there isn’t really time for our egos to get in the way.” The legion of bearded, sweater-vested critics will want to file this album under ‘Prog Rock’ because it doesn’t offer up sugary cast-offs for the short-attention-span set, but no one ever danced to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. It might instead be this generation’s Marquee Moon, or an indie rock Chinese Democracy released thirty years early and sixty million dollars under budget (and without cornrows, to boot). Better, though, to think of it as the sound of a band edging forward into a wispy darkness, one hand reaching out, the other firmly clutching the past.
The two distinct, exceptional songwriters in Wolf Parade-- Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug-- combine to create a record that seems focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, 2005's Apologies to the Queen Mary.
The downside of releasing an excellent debut is that nobody lets you forget it. But Wolf Parade manages to move forward just fine on its sophomore effort At Mount Zoomer. Scaling back the frenetic pace and combustible forcefulness of 2005's Apologies To The Queen Mary, Wolf Parade no longer sounds like a band pushing…
With At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade has quite easily surpassed the greatness that was their debut.
When Wolf Parade released their debut full-length, Apologies to the Queen Mary in 2005, it came as a shock to those of us who had followed the band's...
Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer review: Wolf Parade have once again defined a sound that is unequivocally theirs, but as a whole the songs tend to sound too similar too one another over the long haul to match up to Apologies’ breakneck pace and innovative rapid-fire changes.<script src=