No apologies

Wolf Parade’s latest, At Mount Zoomer,
stretches beyond mere pop songs

COMPLICATIONS ENSUE: Wolf Parade

by ERIK LEIJON

In India, nobody calls the local cuisine Indian food. In Helsinki, it’s not referred to as a Finnish sauna. When Wolf Parade are fighting it out with other bands for online diggs and precious indie music blog real estate, tastemakers perched in the ivory towers of Hypeville U.S.A. might add the prefix “Montreal wolf band” to the frequently lauded quintet (along with a series of increasingly bombastic adjectives and descriptions), but ’round these parts, the beast built by the Krug/Boeckner writing pillar simply goes by the humble name Wolf Parade.

This past June, music critics were once again reaching for their thesauri in an effort to describe the band’s less formulaic, more adventurous second disc, At Mount Zoomer. Most music bloggers will attest the title “Montreal progressive rock wolf band” rolls just as easily off of the tongue.

“Yeah, that term [progressive] does come up,” says drummer Arlen Thompson. “I guess, for a lot of people, it means stretching beyond a mere pop song. Maybe a band gets a little more complicated, delving deeper musically.”

For Wolf Parade, delving deeper largely resulted from a more organic songwriting process. Their slapdash debut, 2005’s Apologies to the Queen Mary, culled tracks from their previous EPs and the result was a series of great, unrelated tunes written separately either by vocalist/keyboardist Spencer Krug or vocalist/guitarist Dan Boeckner. At Mount Zoomer, named after Thompson’s Montreal studio and the group’s “home base,” was a much more collaborative effort between the five members.

“We started by just sitting around playing music together,” says Thompson. “In that really freeform, improvisational kind of way. It wasn’t so much about one guy bringing in a song as it was all of us playing together and allowing our favourite parts to evolve over time.”

Not only was the writing of the album more cooperative, Thompson also handled most of the production duties, replacing Apologies’ producer (and Modest Mouse frontman) Isaac Brock. “We wanted a much more raw, live feel for the record,” Thompson says, adding the shift in production style didn’t reflect their feelings concerning Brock’s work. “I honestly don’t remember [what Apologies sounded like]. It’s been years since I’ve listened to it, not since it was being mastered.”

Although Thompson, guitarist Dante DeCaro and sound manipulator Hadji Bakara were more involved in the songwriting process, Wolf Parade remains the product of a dichotomous songwriting arrangement between Boeckner and Krug. At Mount Zoomer follows the Apologies sequencing pattern of alternating between Boeckner and Krug songs, a format Thompson says isn’t deliberate. The record was also written and recorded fairly quickly, meaning there wasn’t much discussion between band members about recurring themes. Seemingly one exception to the norm is the near 11-minute closer, the epic “Kissing the Beehive”—uniquely featuring vocals from both primary songwriters.

“It was written pretty much the same way,” admits Thompson. “We compiled our favourite bits from the jam sessions and fit them together in one song. It ends up being our big magnum opus to close the album, but for us it’s made up of our favourite small parts. They [Krug and Boeckner] might have collaborated a bit, but I think they were just doing their own things.”

With Wintersleep at Metropolis
on Sunday, Aug. 3, 8:30 p.m.,
$20, all ages