|
|
 |
Wolf Parade.
 As an Australian music journalist I like to be a bit of an iconoclast. You know, I see all those big-talking northern hemisphere magazines going on about their fancy new bands and I want to be able to poo-poo it on principle, just to show them that I'm nobody's rock-criticism bitch.
Unfortunately Canada's managed to bitchify me twice in recent memory. The first time was in late 2004 when I first heard The Arcade Fire. The second time was in late 2005 when I received a copy of Wolf Parade's 'Apologies To The Queen Mary'. In both cases the pre-release hype was deafening; and in both cases it was completely justified. Hence I now find myself talking to Wolf Parade's drummer Arlen Thompson about the weather, until he interrupts me when I try to convert the Australian temperature into Fahrenheit: "No it's OK, we're Celsius too. We're the same Commonwealth, man!"
The two nations have more in common than that: we're both metric, we're both broadly ignored on the world stage, and both produce fantastic bands. "That's true: actually, we played a couple of shows with Architecture In Helsinki last tour. They're really swell kids and we just meshed really well."
He admits that the amount of expectation for the record "feels a bit strange. I mean, when we first started working on it there really wasn't much of anything, but [the buzz] just kept growing and growing and growing, but eventually you just have to let it go and not worry about it too much. And luckily people liked it," he laughs. "I almost in some ways wanted people to knock the record a bit - it really is a bit ridiculous how quickly the machine gets going sometimes.
And it's not like it hasn't happened before: fellow Victorians Hot Hot Heat suffered from the enormous expectations placed on their commercially-disappointing second album. "I'm good friends with those guys and they just had a more high stakes thing going on with so much more weight and money behind them because they'd made that leap from Sub Pop to Warner Brothers. And it's a big leap."
'Apologies To The Queen Mary' has a lot going on, with Boekner and fellow vocalist/keyboardist Spencer Krug's dynamic songcraft augmented by Thompson's powerhouse drumming and Bakara's washes of Brian Eno-esque electronics over the top. It seems that it could tip over into chaos very easily, especially live. "Well yeah - we kind of sometimes affectionately call our sound 'the wall of shit'," he laughs. "Sometimes you can just get so much going on all at once, and now we've got Dante [DeCarlo, former Hot Hot Heat guitarist] playing with us and it can become this absolute wall of noise, especially with our earlier shows when we were playing without any sort of sound man in art spaces and whatnot."
DeCarlo has been touring with the 'Parade for a while now and Thompson pauses when I ask if he's staying on. "I think so: I know he's going to contribute for the next record for sure. He's got his own projects so it's definitely his call, but we've really enjoyed playing with him. He's one of my favourite guitarists ever, so I hope he can do as much touring and recording with us as he can."
Which raises the question: what it is with these Canadians and their loose, collective approach to their bands? I mean, there's The New Pornographers, The Arcade Fire (which Thompson once drummed in, as it happens), Broken Social Scene...
"And Destroyer too: Spencer played with them! I don't know what it is, but I think there's this thing with Canada where we're so culturally unambitious compared with our neighbours down south and we almost make a point of it. No-one ever takes things too seriously; we're all just concerned with making good music."
Andrew P Street
 | 'Apologies To The Queen Mary' is out now through Sub Pop/Stomp. |
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
