>>PREVIEW
WOLF PARADE
Wednesday, October 5
MacEwan Hall (U of C)
From their earliest days as a quickly-assembled ragtag group, Wolf Parade have perked up the ears of Montreal’s music scene. Relatively unheard of for a band with so little recorded music to its credit, Wolf Parade became an instant Internet-blog hit, their two self-released EPs managing to sell more than 3,000 copies (so many orders were arriving on the band’s doorstep that the handmade silk-screened covers were replaced with Ziploc bags). The reason is simple – as a new band, Wolf Parade sound as though they’ve played together forever, the songs rolling off their tongues effortlessly. Self-released CD-Rs in Ziploc bags never sounded so good.
Snatched up by Sub Pop, Wolf Parade’s razor-sharp debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, arrives on a wave of expectation and pulls it off. While some of the songs are familiar from their EPs, the album’s re-configurations perfect them to a near-scientific formula. Filled with danceable yet obtuse pop from start to finish, Apologies is brave in the face of the fickle-minded indie hype. Wolf Parade have a Sub Pop contract and heaps of press in all the coolest magazines because they deserve it – how often does that happen?
Unique as their song-sense may be, Wolf Parade treads heavily in the shadows of The O.C. favourites Modest Mouse, and borrows a page from Interpol (themselves no strangers to outright thievery) and those other Internet phenomenons, The Arcade Fire. In the case of Wolf Parade, the best route to acknowledge one’s most obvious influences is to embrace them – the band toured with both Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire, but also recorded much of Apologies with Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock in his home city of Portland.
"I’ve never really had anyone produce anything before and it was this kind-of feeling-out thing," says drummer Arlen Thompson. "That said – and we’re very happy with the album – we’re not going to work with a producer again, which is just the way we work. Everything else is self-produced and we’ve got a lot of ideas of how we’d like to work within that. We’re taking our Sub Pop money and building a full studio in Montreal called the 100-Sided Die."
Still, Wolf Parade’s approach differs greatly from their big-name friends. Brattier (not to mention much less annoyingly intellectualized) than Modest Mouse and somewhat more light-hearted than The Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade stand right where they should behind the hooks and crannies of their songs.
It can’t be easy facing pages upon pages worth of hype-fuelled eulogizing before your album’s even in the shops, but Wolf Parade have taken their good fortune in stride. Even Thompson admits that nothing could have prepared them for the wild ride they’re currently on.
"It just keeps getting faster and faster. It’s very strange, and when this stuff happens it just kind of goes like a rock down a hill. I don’t really know how we’ve sold 3,000 copies of our second EP."
And while it’s certainly nice to give your mother a copy of Time magazine, with your band listed inside as one of "Canada’s most anticipated indie albums of the year" (your touring mates The Arcade Fire on the cover), Arlen and Wolf Parade know where their bread has been buttered.
"I’d have to put it mostly to the Internet," he says. "People just hear us from all over the place through weblogs and MP3s of our music. To us that’s totally OK — it’s basically the reason why anyone has heard of us. I don’t think anyone really takes Rolling Stone or Spin or the print magazines seriously anymore. They’re just based on marketing and PR campaigns for the major labels. Everyone now just uses Internet sites. They’re free and really on top of things. Spin seems to be for teenagers in Wal-Marts who don’t know any better, and it shows that there’s a real transition in music journalism."
Thompson remains modest about Wolf Parade’s side-stepping into the biggest indie leagues in so few moves. "You just take it as you come," he says. "I don’t think anyone in our band has any designs to do much more than we’re doing now. This is really as much as we’d want to deal with. Call it ‘professional’ or whatever, but it stops being about hanging out and writing songs and now you worry about your flights to wherever it is you’re going next. It’s been a bit overwhelming to the point where it would almost feel better to be smaller." |
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