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April 22, 2008
The New Wolf Parade Album: A Track-by-Track Preview
Sometimes we hear albums before most, and occasionally when they are still pretty top secret. It's horribly unfair, we know. But in an attempt to at least soothe your curiosity, we are not averse to laying out these tantalizing near-future albums in extensive detail. You may remember our guide to the still(!) unreleased new Portishead record. Now, in regard to the successor to the site's favorite record of 2005, we turn to part-time music critic and occasional krautrocker John Motley. Take it away John...
As great as Wolf Parade's 2005 debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, was, it showed a band democratically divided between two distinct personalities. Throughout the entire record, Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner politely flip-flopped between melodramatic prog tendencies and homespun Springsteen worship, respectively. In the three years since, the band has been seemingly drawn and quartered by myriad side projects. Most notably, Krug issued two albums and an EP as Sunset Rubdown; moonlit in Frog Eyes; and indulged a studio one-off as Swan Lake with Dan "Destroyer" Bejar and Frog Eyes' Carey Mercer. Boeckner, on the other hand, unveiled every trapper's delight: his own Handsome Furs, a drum machine-fueled duo with his wife Alexei Perry.
Recording this still-untitled second album (both Pardon My Blues and Kissing the Beehive were red herrings, apparently) must have been somewhat arduous. According to the band, early candidates for album number two were shelved for sounding like Apologies holdovers. To trigger fresh strategies, they began recording improvisational sessions to see if something spontaneous could be extracted and developed into a more structured composition. But how well did such a disjointed band reconnect? And did it manage to evolve creatively, rather than simply lapse into formula? Based on some rather compulsive listening, the answer is: not so easily. While the new album does reveal Wolf Parade to repeatedly play against its instincts and expand its sound, half the album sounds like Apologies-era paint-by-numbers. Yes, that's a slight, but remember: Wolf Parade still slay the competition.
Here's the breakdown:
1. "Soldier's Grin"
As an opening shot, this one's a little timid. The Boeckner-penned song is a tidy segue from Apologies' farewell, "This Heart's on Fire": steadily driving rhythms, Krug's bubbling budget synth tones, and Boeckner's keening, earnest vocals. But around the two-minute mark, the song slows to a looser, more ambling tempo for some necessary breathing room and a satisfyingly plodding climax.
The rollicking ragtime noir piano riffing immediately announces that this is a Krug composition. While the jerky vamping conjures Apologies opener "You Are a Runner," "Call It a Ritual" gradually fills out with passages of teeth-clenching guitar scrawls. As Krug sings "while you turn your flower petals so slow," the song continually blossoms into something lovelier than Krug's scrawny sketch suggested at the beginning.
3. "Language City" (mp3 is live bootleg)
Back to Boeckner — and the first sign of the Wolf Parade we've missed so much. Here the band bang out a serviceable verse, but knock it out of the park on the restrained choruses, in which Boeckner sings, "All this work in, just to tear it down" over several complementary keyboard melodies. The song's coda drags more than it explodes, though, as Boeckner cribs lyrics from the last time he recorded an outgoing message: "We are not at home! We are not at home! We are not at hoooooooome!"
4. "Bang Your Drum"
With its creepy harpsichord, descending melody, and archaic lyrical tropes, "Bang Your Drum" sounds like a cameo by Sunset Rubdown to me. Here, Krug wonders over some character of ill repute: "Do they beat that drum to get you back home or do they beat it to keep you away?" He also shows how his friendship with Dan Bejar has paid off in musical collateral, ending the song with a beloved Bejar device: the song-within-a-song. Like the conclusions of "A Testament to Youth in Verse" (from the New Pornographers' Electric Version) or "Leopard of Honor" (from Destroyer's Trouble in Dreams), Krug leads a chorus of la-la-la's, ostensibly belted out by the "you" in this song.
5. "California Dreamer"
Here's where things start to get good. Yes, there's the unmistakably clichéd title, but Krug uses the Summer of Love connotations to craft something far more sinister. While the song retains the Mamas and the Papas' conceit of displacement and love lost (Krug laments a lover's departure for the Golden State, which strands him in Canada to make snow angels solo), it scrambles the rest of the signal. (Key lyric: "I thought I might have heard you on the radio/But the radio waves were like snow.") In spite of Krug's sunny, Supertramp keyboards, Wolf Parade detour through Los Angeles' ghettos with a bludgeoning caveman riff and honking sax passage that evokes the Stooges' Fun House.
6. "The Grey Estates"
Another predictably direct Boeckner tune spoils the first sign of legitimate experimentation. Upbeat, instantly catchy, "The Grey Estates" is the album's lone shot at a single. Sadly, that means this is the most defanged, declawed pup of the litter. As Boeckner sings about "rolling past the grey estates" on his way to "a new world" it's an apt metaphor for enduring the drab scenery — especially since the album's most exciting songs lurk just around the corner.
7. "Fine Young Cannibals" (mp3 is live bootleg)
Finally, Boeckner breaks out of Bruce idolatry on this sprawling workout. Stitched together like a dance track, "Fine Young Cannibals" never really deviates from a single groove, but aggressively adds and subtracts elements for an engaging listen. Against a relatively static (albeit funky) backdrop, Boeckner focuses on his vocal chops and wrings ample emotional gravitas out of his precise phrasing.
8. "An Animal in Your Care"
Like "Call It a Ritual" and "Bang Your Drum," Krug indulges more moody, echoing production values on "An Animal in Your Care." On their own, these production decisions are sound, but, compared to the frill-less treatment of Boeckner's tracks, sabotage the album's bid for coherence. Still, this is one of the album's standouts. Beginning hushed and skeletal, "An Animal in Your Care" grows full and feral by its end. Krug lets a repeated descending piano line dangle like a false ending, but the entire bands converges for a cathartic finale.
9. "Kissing the Beehive"
Named after Jonathan Carroll's novel of the same name, "Kissing the Beehive" is fittingly long. Spanning nearly 10 minutes, the song is notably co-written by Boeckner and Krug, who share vocal duties on this multi-part epic. After a brief lull as Krug sings the disappointed kiss-off of the title ("As if you didn't know that it would sting/Kissing the beehive…"), its fiery middle section builds until it burns itself out. After a brief interlude of silence, the band reloads for an epilogue of sorts: two more minutes of dance-floor detonation. Krug's bouncing synths lock gears with Arlen Thompson's mechanical drumming, while Boeckner and Dante DeCaro's guitar debris skitters and squeals toward a tidy master-fade that's more like a curtain call.
Posted by Jeff Klingman at April 22, 2008 02:00 PM
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Comments
I like it a bit more than you maybe John. It seems pretty Dan-dominated as far as i can tell, but that might just be because the Spencer songs are the creepers. I predict it'll get kind of a lukewarm response, just 'cause it isn't super conducive to single serving blog posts and there's no "Shine a Light" or "You are a Runner" to speak of. But I think Boeckner especially made kind of a song-writing leap here, and even his singing is more nuanced...
Posted by: Jeff K at April 22, 2008 04:21 PM
It is not as evolved as I would have liked, but still better than 95% the music out there. After about the 5th listen I started to develop a crush.
Posted by: es at April 26, 2008 10:25 AM
I thought the album as a whole was a lot more "contained" than I expected... hearing nearly all of these songs live, they seemed to be missing a lot of the emotion in the vocals once they hit the studio (well, I guess Call it a Ritual more than any other song).
Don't get me wrong, I still love the album, I just have one question: what ever happened to "Things I Don't Know"? That was my favorite live song they've been playing in the last couple years. I thought for sure it would have made it on the final cut...
Posted by: Greg at May 1, 2008 05:40 PM
Why do the covers to Krug-related albums continue to prominently feature Jabberwocks?
Posted by: Jeff K at May 2, 2008 10:23 AM
You're not kidding. The new WP cover art is something ugly. Maybe they figure most people will get it electronically.
Posted by: Randall Monty at May 2, 2008 01:44 PM
Oh, please. You kids acting like you don't love beasts from "Clash of the Titans."
Posted by: John M at May 2, 2008 06:32 PM
