Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 24/10/05
Label: Sub Pop

Were, indeed, any ever needed, there are now numerous unchallengeable reasons - The Arcade Fire, Death From Above 1979, Stars, The Constantines, Caribou, Broken Social Scene, We Are Wolves and The New Pornographers among them - to hold back on the sneers once directed at Canada and her alternative rock output. The geographical spotlight now focused principally on Montreal, due to the success of the extraordinary Arcade Fire is, of course, both a good and reasonable and a bad and stupid thing. It reveals bands who might otherwise have been toiling away in criminally unrecognised frustration for years, but it also means a number of very average bands who might rightly have been ignored may well be trumpeted as The Next Big Thing, simply because of where they live.

So to Wolf Parade, for whom geography is the "and" rather than the "because". This Montreal four-piece have been together just two and a half years and formed in a kind of panic, after keyboardist and vocalist Spencer Krug found himself booked to play a support gig for friends The Arcade Fire when, in fact, he didn't have a band. He and guitarist/vocalist Dan Boeckner thus hurriedly assembled one and knocked out a bunch of songs days before the show. Out of such pants-seat flying was borne sweet inspiration.

"Apologies To The Queen Mary" is a hugely impressive debut from such a young band. Stoked by the same rhythmic urgency as The Arcade Fire's "Funeral" and sharing their love of symphonic melodrama, it too brims over with epic emotionalism, but a tendency to skronk-out melodically aligns Wolf Parade with Pavement and Modest Mouse, whose frontman Isaac Brock both discovered the band and produced their album.

It opens with the audaciously bare-bones percussive intro of "You Are A Runner And I Am My Father's Son", which is soon gate-crashed by a gloriously drunken keyboard riff and anguished falsetto that cause the song to see-saw wildly throughout. "Fancy Claps" starts with a tentative tune-up but is then off at full-tilt, careering down scales and running off the rails with Krug's needling keyboard motif, while "We Built Another World" and "Shine A Light" borrow the dark, viscous intensity of Interpol.

The mighty "Dinner Bells" appropriates the noisy guitar eruptions of Radiohead's "Creep" but is imbued with an almost funereal stillness, Boeckner's voice sounding like he's lost in a white-out while Hadji Bakara's "electronic manipulations" recreate the snow storm. The spirit of "Fake Plastic Trees" hovers over "Same Ghost Every Night", the end of which Krug draws out until it finally dissolves in a single, eerie keyboard note. Closer "This Heart's On Fire" serves as Wolf Parade's theme song, with Boeckner yelping those words over and over until his anguish builds to euphoric release. "It's getting better all the time," he cries in the chorus.

Indeed it is - Wolf Parade, we salute you.

    by Sharon O'Connell