wolf parade by lindsay

A Week With Wolf Parade's "At Mount Zoomer": Day 3

29 August 2008
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Kyle Smith // Illustration by Lindsay Preston

At Mount Zoomer was supposed to be called Kissing the Beehive. With this in mind, I now tackle the final and would-be title track, an eleven-minute rocker that manages to also be “epic.” Length alone does not an epic song make; everyone’s got their own definition but I’ve always seen an epic song as something displaying the musician’s collective prowess and expanding into a sum far greater than its parts. It also doesn’t hurt that Spencer and Dan split verses in singing something like a sea song, though I’m completely unable to follow the story.

I’ve tried listening to the song while following along with the massive watercolor poster insert (sorry, downloading can be for suckers) and am still lost. But many moments in its eleven minutes serve almost as little chapter breaks, breaking down the epic into parts of wonderful pop songs. It’s something distinctively progressive—perhaps pioneered by the Fiery Furnaces on their unparalleled _Blueberry Boat_—and now reads like inverted Girl Talk: instead of the best moments in one song, we get the best songs in one song.

Spencer and Dan—both deserving, by the way, of first-name recognition, even though I feel uncomfortable and creepy addressing them as such—share songwriting duties here, breaking the tie that exists among the albums other 8 songs, which is akin to Spider-Man and Batman teaming up, I suppose. Dan’s verses specialize in dark realism while Spencer conjures up abstraction. Check the transition between their first handoff:

Dan: “We’re just drifting on my long hair with the flies/And a captain, oh he is never denied…
Spencer: “As if you didn’t know that it would sting/Kissing the beehive.”

I’m oversimplifying horribly, but I just want to get to the song’s crashes. At two different moments, all the shit going on flushes together into orchestrated bliss. When driving, I feel compelled to check the timecode when these happened, as if to reference back to them (FYI: 3:26 and 7:17, with a bit at 10:30). The second one, though far briefer, is somehow as memorable, and pleases me enough to endure the noisy ramblings that finish the album.

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fire in the hole

Matt | 1 September 2008

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