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Monorails and
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Wolf Parade have called Montreal home for nearly a decade, but Boeckner, Dante Decaro, Spencer Krug and Arlen Thomson all hail from B.C., where the 1986 Expo brought the world’s achievements in transportation technology together in one coastal city that was still in its infancy. “Growing up in a small town on Vancouver Island, I’d been to Victoria but I’d never really spent time in Vancouver, so it was a major eye-opening experience for me,” says Boeckner. Not only did he experience the big city for the first time, its skyline transformed by such futuristic structures as the SkyTrain and the silver-plated Science World dome, but he saw the world through Expo’s pavilions. As an eight-year-old, Boeckner was thrilled by the science and technology displays, and scared by such sights as the austere German pavilion, dedicated to “manufacturing and efficiency,” and (also from Germany) the legendary industrial noise act Einsturzende Neubauten. “I have this memory of these terrifying men banging on stuff. I think I appreciate it a little more now.” Apart from inspiring Expo envy in their Montreal peers, for whom the 1967 edition is a myth experienced only through NFB documentaries and the memories of our parents, Wolf Parade’s album title is an expression of unison at an interesting time for the band. They recently lost keyboardist Hadji Bakara to the University of Chicago, where he’s pursuing a PhD in English lit and a teaching career. As a quartet, backed by esteemed local producer Howard Bilerman (who recorded their very first demo back in 2003), they’ve made a truly collaborative album, written together and recorded live. “This record is my favourite Wolf Parade record, and it has to do with the way we recorded it,” says Boeckner. “We all love Howard. Howard’s watched Wolf Parade since our first couple of shows, we’re all friends with him and we’ve played music with him, and he was just the ideal person to say, ‘You guys can do better,’ or, ‘That was great, don’t over-think it and do it again.’ We put a lot of trust in him, and we never had to look at the coloured bars. There’s an energy that we couldn’t capture on the last record, and part of that is [due to] working with a system where you’re constantly looking at a visual representation of what you’ve just played, like, there’s the guitar and there’s where I screwed up on the guitar, maybe we should go in and edit it out, pitch-correct this and slide the drums over a bit. We just wanted to completely avoid that ’cause I think the listener can tell when that’s happening, whether they know it or not. It sucks some energy out of the recording.” With minimal overdubs or multi-tracked vocals, the band’s latest collection of rock songs sounds rejuvenated, accelerated, bolder and flashier, from the riffs to the rhythms to the synths to Boeckner and Krug’s split vocals. As Boeckner sees it, it’s the next best thing to seeing the band on stage. “If somebody had never heard Wolf Parade before, my ideal delivery vehicle for the songs would be for them to come to the show and see these sweaty men playing the songs. That’s the most honest expression of whatever Wolf Parade is.” WITH MOOOLS AT LE NATIONAL ON |
