by SHANE SINNOTT

After some false starts—Dan Boeckner told Pitchfork last March that “I’d like to be finished with this record by May”—a new record from local darlings Wolf Parade is imminent. Sub Pop will be releasing At Mount Zoomer on June 17, and tracks have begun to leak. You’d best start downloading now, friend, as I’d imagine an opinion on this one is going to be requisite for the St-Viateur set.

The first is “Language City,” which you can download at tinyurl.com/4f9nto. My initial thoughts are that it’s A) good, and B) sounds indistinguishable from a Handsome Furs song. I think we all expected this—with the major side projects of the aforementioned Furs and Spencer Krug’s Sunset Rubdown, plus Hadji Bakar’s involvement with Megasoid, it’s hard to imagine these guys spending a whole lot of time together these days writing songs. If you cruise over to tinyurl.com/549sqw, you can get the other track floating around, called “California Dreamer.” This song is also good. It also sounds like a Sunset Rubdown song. The thing is, I think where most bands would be hitting a guaranteed sophomore slump if they spent as much time on other projects between albums as these guys have, there’s enough talent in this band that they’ll probably pull it off. People will enjoy the tracks and maybe look other way on the lack-of-cohesive-sound thing. Besides, it’s hard to fault them for having side projects that worked out, now, isn’t it?

In other news, an online application called Music Arsenal (www.musicarsenal.com) is currently having a private beta test which you can sign up for at tinyurl.com/56p23v. The service has been around for about five years, and the beta will allow new users to try it for free. The thing allows bands and labels to keep track of all the tons of shit that bands and labels have to keep track of. Who you owe press kits to, your lists of promoters and contacts, upcoming tour dates, even a list of record stores near whatever town you happen to be in are stored—and it works through a Web interface too, so you and your labelmates/bandmates can access it all from wherever.