wolf parade by lindsay

A Week With Wolf Parade's "At Mount Zoomer": Day 1

21 August 2008
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Kyle Smith // Illustration by Lindsay Preston

These Wolf Parade guys have crazy similar voices. Take that as a run-on or a descriptive clause. I don’t think it matters.

The virgin listener (or non-blogger, rather) might think the combined voices of Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug to be one of a single crazy-sounding person. Whatever nuances between them tend to come out in their songwriting: Krug, deceptively clean-cut, tends toward strange fits of beauty in both lyrics and orchestration: “You held your cap in the air and called it a guitar” he gasps on “Kissing the Beehive” before an epic crash that then leads to some frenzied guitar work that seems to borrow from both Tool (chugging little arpeggios) and Roxy Music.

Boeckner, despite looking near-death every time I’ve seen him perform, tends to write warmer, more conventional songs. A first run-thru of At Mount Zoomer sees “Language City” as an immediate highlight: a driving drum and the echo of power chords that we’re so conditioned to know as signals of greatness to come.

It’s the way that Boeckner’s voice nearly cracks, though: “Language city is a bad, old place — we all kn_ow!_” His passion—for what?—is unimportant; it’s the only thing that pulls me through these songs.

I make no claims to ever understanding what’s so inviting about Wolf Parade, just that I’m compelled to listen to these songs over and over again.

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