| Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer |
|
|
| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Monday, July 7, 2008 at 08:49 AM | |
 Wolf ParadeAt Mount Zoomer Sub Pop subpop.com myspace.com/wolfparade At Mount Zoomer is beginning to piss me off. I am absolutely, one hundred percent assured of its Grade A quality, of the subtle magic that links such simple pieces—light-as-air keyboards, gritty and grinding guitars, Spencer Krug's quavering croon, Dan Boeckner's gravelly howl—into thick, wide, spacious compositions. But I'll be damned if I'm close to figuring out how to pull it all apart, lay it out, and put it back together. Because on the surface, Wolf Parade's second record is a very basic rock album. This does not mean it should be mistaken for a typical rock record, though. Through Krug and Boeckner's lyrics runs a thread of frustration tempered by hope, of deep ambivalence overcome by a mix of resolve and desperation. "Oh, the long and bitter road / let us down," laments Boeckner on "Language City," "Oh, the ringing telephone. / There's no one around." "I thought I might have heard you on the radio," cries Krug on "California Dreamer," "but the radio waves were like snow." Throughout, these words of disappointment are ameliorated by words that point to hope, to an escape from the crush of modern life, and nowhere more resoundingly than on "The Grey Estates": "So let the needle on the compass swing / Let the iron in your heart's blood sing. / Strike up the band as the ship goes down / and if it's loud enough it will erase the sound / of one hundred thousand sad inventions. / Let them rot / inside the grey estate." The music that supports the lyrics is itself a promise of escape, and there's something parallel about the way the songs are tied together thematically and the way the songs are constructed. Where their debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, was recorded in piecemeal fashion, At Mount Zoomer grew out of extended improvisations, and the final recordings bear their mark as tempos downshift and accelerate within the songs. "California Dreamer" begins delicately but insistently before ramping up into a frenzy—a full 25 bpm faster by the end than it began. "Language City" opens at an uneasy stroll before breaking into a run to the finish line. The result is a strikingly organic and raw record, but sheer emotion always seems subservient to the craft of the songs—fittingly for a band on the road to nowhere, the music speaks to nostalgia and care, even as the lyrics seek to burn it all down. But already I feel like I'm falling down the rabbit hole. With Apologies to the Queen Mary, I could always point to "I'll Believe in Anything" as the song on a record of great songs, but At Mount Zoomer is so complete and interdependent that it's hard to point to one thing or one way to get inside it. On first listen, it only seems remarkable when you get to the end of epic closer "Kissing the Beehive" and realize that you need to go back and listen again. But maybe that's their greatest accomplishment: a thoroughly basic, but not typical or simple, rock record that pulls you closer by degrees over repeated listenings. Stream "The Grey Estates" below: COMING UP: Wolf Parade with The Listening Party. Wednesday, July 9. First Avenue. 8 pm. 18+. $15. |
|
| Last Updated: Monday, July 7, 2008 at 08:51 AM |
Featured Concerts
