WOLF PARADE
At Mount Zoomer is Montreal based Wolf Parade’s second album for Sub Pop & follow up to their debut Apologies to the Queen Mary.
Rather than mimic the sound of their debut album, 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. Wolf Parade drummer Arlen Thompson recorded and engineered the entire album, and his attempt to render with an absolute minimum of effects and post-production knob twiddling the crisp, dry sound of the church studio reveals with startling resolution the part each band member plays, in holding these songs aloft.
The result is a complex matrix of components and modules that, thanks to the collective efforts of each band member, never feels laboured or fussy.
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 Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway . It might instead be this generation’s Marquee Moon, or an indie rock Chinese Democracy (Guns n Roses) 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!
MUST HAVE RELEASE
AT MOUNT ZOOMER