Wolf Parade - Expo 86
Apologies to the Queen Mary, Wolf Parade’s Debut album, is a stone classic. It transcended topical hype and introduced us to a band that wore its jittery weirdness as a badge of honor. It took predictable themes and influences (technological unease, breakups, Bowie, the Boss) and rendered them wholly sublime. It twisted the fraught pretense of having two songwriting frontmen into a shining example of mutual complement. Maybe it was just too much greatness for one band to contain. Though remaining nominally unified, there’s been a splintering effect in the Wolf Parade camp these last few years. Their sophomore effort, 2008’s At Mount Zoomer, was darker, heavier, and more opaque than Apologies, the sound of a band not quite sure what to do with itself as its primary members pursued their own interests. Dan Boeckner’s Handsome Furs and Spencer Krug’s Sunset Rubdown projects have proven the separate artistry of Wolf Parade’s frontmen to such an extent that I’ve wondered whether they’d ever reignite the spark of cooperation. Their third full-length (due out next Tuesday but streaming from the band’s myspace page since last week), is a resounding answer to those doubts.
Recorded live in the studio with very few overdubs (vocals, mostly), Expo 86 is by no coincidence the warmest and most present Wolf Parade have ever sounded. More than a loose tracking method, it’s a statement of unity and purpose. The four band members realized that, before they knew each other, they had all attended the Vancouver world’s fair from which the record takes its title as children. Thus, the solidarity of Wold Parade jamming in a room together is framed as something like destiny. There are only a few brief moments when the entire band isn’t playing full force, but they deftly dodge muddiness and overcrowding. Their characteristically ornate, new-wave-meets-rococo melodic trills come though unscathed. Guitars are full and crunchy, synths are fuzzy and blended, and Arlen Thompson’s drums have regained much of the powerful Bonham smack of the band’s best work. Even outside of Wolf Parade’s history, the smart, red-blooded rock of 86 feels wonderfully fresh and focused at a time when a lot of new bands are skewing psychedelic.
Despite finding a new shot of life in their cohesion, Krug and Boeckner’s perennial themes remain wholly intact. In all of his projects, Boeckner is an undisputed Springsteen disciple through and through. He gravitates toward the propulsive and the anthemic, with a scratchy (if completely unhinged) voice and windmill guitars to match. His contributions to 86 riff on all of his major preoccupations: suffocating modernity, environmental destruction, empty rooms, ghosts, towns, and transformative wanderlust. “Baby walked me through an awful dream / rotten traffic’s by the sea,” he begins on “Palm Road,” invoking a favorite apocalyptic scenario. He softens the blow of a lot of his songs here by addressing to specific female characters. “Little Golden Age” finds him calling a city “the machine that put the iron in your heart,” but thankfully he balances it out with a keen eye for detail: “You left town feeling pretty down / with your headphones in your coat / and your dirty graduation gown / you were in the bedroom singing radio songs.”
The need to get away is Boeckner’s most powerful subject, as on “Ghost Pressure” (“little vision come shake me up…I could do with a little mystery”) and “Pobody’s Nerfect” (“We built this city on cocaine lasers…but morning will turn everything back to gold”). His final song, “Yulia,” explores an inverted perspective as a way to hone in on his acute fear of technological control. Playing his own version of Major Tom, he mumbles “they flick one switch at mission control / and I’m never coming home.” As he imagines emploring the furthest reaches of space, he finds “nothing out here” and longs only to get back to the titular love.
Krug, by nature, has always been less consistent. He’s a tinkerer, crafting nontraditional song structures and spinning complicated, verbose mythologies with his histrionic Bowie-yowl of a voice. His work in Sunset Rubdown has gone down some pretty dense and high-minded paths, but recently he’s aimed for a more communicable focus. Here, he points his metaphoric constructions toward themes he’s often shown the most skewed knack for: longing, alienation, and deconstruction. He opens the album by deflating his own hip self-mythology (“You’ll never be born as a scorpion…you’re just another pair of boat shoes / walking away from the harbor”) and follows it up with a paranoid jealousy on standout single “What Did My Lover Say?” The funky electro of “In the Direction of the Moon” finds him cheekily displaying his own geekiness. “I take my meals with weirdos / and play with my rocket ships / and all the while you are so composed,” he laments, “you are the most gracious thing I know.” It doesn’t have the heart-on-sleeve charm of Apologies’ “I’ll Believe in Anything,” but it’s poignant. He also worries about aging on “Oh You, Old Thing”: “Who’s gonna steam up all your dance halls…when all the good men have had all their daughters / and all the other men have fallen in with daisies? / Well I don’t wanna be the last one standing.”
Like Boeckner, Krug harbors a distrust of confined settings, but he’d rather tear the city to the ground than run away from it. His punk-ified closer “Cave-o-Sapien” is a great illustration, with Krug envisioning his own desire to burn it all down as a violent neanderthal creature that follows him around. But just like Boeckner, he finds a painful double edge in destructive escapism. “You’re not [like] the sunrise, you’re just alone,” he realizes. But it’s too late to stop it, and the record ends with a resigned “I’ve got you / ‘till you’re gone.” As harrowing as it is to hear Wolf Parade struggle against the basic constructs of love and society, Expo 86 is ultimately a heartening experience, proof of the strength of their musical chemistry, their friendship, and that the band can still be more than the sum of its parts. It’s good to have them back together.
