Ugh. I began to write this entry while procrastinating a week’s worth of hell, and I finished it doing the same thing. Only this time it was a different week. Regardless, this list took a lot longer than the last, for obvious reasons, and only makes me dread making part 3 (the movies list) sometime in later January in ways that still somehow allow me to look forward to it. Either way, it’s a nice feeling of relief to know I’m done with this, and I like my picks. I’m eager to see how different mine are from Pitchfork. After all, that’s the only reason I wanted to put this out so soon – to beat Pitchfork and to prevent myself from being influenced. Anyway, here goes.
Posts Tagged Wolf Parade
Getting through a long movie; Wolf Parade review
So I’ve been trying to watch Lawrence of Arabia lately, and I’ve discovered that I’ve lost a lot of my attention span for movies. I’m always pausing and walking away to do things, and I’m beginning to frustrate myself. I used to be really good about watching movies – I wanted to just watch it, and I could get engrossed really easily. I don’t know what’s changed – maybe it’s the environment, and I’ll be better about it when I get back to school. I hope so.
Anyway, Wolf Parade is another in a long list of bands about which I don’t know the full story. This is what I know. Their two frontmen are Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug. Dan Boeckner is also the frontman for a band called the Handsome Furs; Spencer Krug is also the frontman for a band called Sunset Rubdown. Both of them sing in kind of gruesome, wobbly tones that you either can tolerate or not. I tend to tolerate it; the only annoying-voiced frontman I can’t get over is Colin Meloy of the Decemberists – don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because of that weird micro-vibrato? I really just don’t know. But anyway, it’s hard enough to keep a band together with two lead singers and songwriters, and it’s even harder to keep it together when they have their own separate bands. After their great debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, they separated to pursue other projects, and had a really tough time reconciling the directions they had since taken. There’s more to the story, I’m sure, but I just don’t know it.
The first thing that jumps out to me about this album is how conflicted it is. I don’t think there’s a single song of these 9 that stays in minor or major keys the whole time, and often the switches go back and forth rapidly; sometimes you can’t even tell what key the song is in. The tempos also are very fluid – lots of breakdowns, give-and-take with fast verses and slow choruses, and of course, two different singers that each take their own songs, until the 10-minute, 52-second closer, “Kissing the Beehive”, in which they trade in the middle.
Reading iTunes’ album notes, I discovered that most of this album was gleaned from improv sessions. That doesn’t surprise me much – it has that kind of feel, that of searching for something great in the song, thinking that you found it, and trying to hold onto it for as long as possible when in truth, those kinds of great moments are almost instantaneous and always fleeting. Take opener “Soldier’s Grin” for example. The song is solid most of the way through, but it sounds undecided. However, there are these two moments that are absolutely sublime, and they happen in close range of each other. When Dan Boeckner sings, “Horse shapin’ fire dragging stereo wire” (I have no idea what it means either), his voice does a really cool trick on the word “stereo” that I just fall for. Shortly after, as the verse gets more insistent and the guitar gets angrier (at about 3:10 in the song), the guitar finally breaks to the front of the mix to rip this fucking badass figure, going way down on the strings where only power chords dare to tread. Thank god they don’t try to repeat that over and over – even the second and final time they do it, it lacks much of the same impact.
The album is a really good listen, especially for songs like “California Dreamer” – the title of which I do not condone and which doesn’t really represent the aesthetic of the song – and aforementioned closer “Kissing the Beehive”, which has a Pink Floyd-like patience about it that may turn some off, but not people like me who dig that kind of patience in putting a song like that together.
However, the constant conflict does get grating sometimes, and most of their choruses’ lyrics seem meaningless to me. The in-verse lyrics are tolerable in a read-between-the-lines kind of way, but jeez. Give some more effort on the lines you repeat. Still, those two drawback don’t prevent me from liking the album on the whole, but I can definitely see this album getting lost in iTunes, only to be rediscovered down the line in a Party Shuffle session – sorry, but that sems to happen for everybody below TV On The Radio in the alphabet (especially sorry about you, Wilco). Give it a try, though. Tell me what you think.
I Ate My DVD Collection 