Jun. 30, 2010 - Issue #767: The Bestest of Edmonton 2010
Expo 86
Wolf Parade / Supplied
Wolf Parade {recordings_bands_mg} Expo 86 {/recordings_bands_mg}
Sub Pop, 2010
4
Even from its relentlessly buzzed-about debut, Wolf Parade has always been the story of two songwriters. Spencer Krug is the wordy, expansive one, given to lyrical flights of fancy and structures that border on prog-ish levels of unhinged musicality and scope; Dan Boeckner is the Springsteen-esque stomper, more grounded in both his word choice and his penchant for stomping and driving straight for the heart of a song. It makes more sense given the runaway success of their respective major side projects, Sunset Rubdown and Handsome Furs, but long before they could retroactively claim to be a supergroup, people were splitting themselves into camps and debating their merits.For its part, the band has never much seemed to care which you liked better, which was one of the group's great strengths. Happily trading off songwriting duties with a metronomic consistency, the disparate but surprisingly complimentary styles have only served thus far to give Wolf Parade an exhilirating dynamic that is understandably absent from either of their solo work, whatever its other considerable merits. They work so well together seperately that you'd hope they keep it that way.
Expo 86, though, seems to pick up where At Mount Zoomer left off, quite literally in this case: "Kissing the Beehive," the tremendous and properly collaborative song that finished Zoomer, informs a lot of the songwriting on Expo, even if the duo are back to trading off. Krug and Boeckner seem to have infected each other more than ever here, and it's almost always for the positive. Where Zoomer seemed to sag a bit under the weight of first-album hangover, Expo 86 recaptures some of the blistering energy and raw vitality that made Queen Mary such an indie landmark.
The album's openers bear some of their writer's hallmarks, but past that the only reliable clue to who wrote it is who's singing it. "Ghost Pressure" and "Pobody's Nerfect," Boeckner's back-to-back stand-outs, benefit as much from importing a bit of Handsome Furs screwy-dance as from a very Krugian expansion, which helps to blow up tales of mere dissatisfaction to epic proportions, confused angst going to existential crisis. Conversely, Krug's "What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had To Go This Way)" is given a harsh bite by a crunchy, Boeckner-ish guitar riff, his usual melancholy poetry sounding even more world-weary propped up against it, while album highlight "In the Directon of the Moon" is Krug stripped down without losing the excess that defines some of his best work.
There are few bands ever who have boasted a songwriting duo as individually accomplished and disparately complimentary Wolf Parade, and Expo 86 proves that they're only growing more comfortable with each other, more able to exploit what the other adds to their style.V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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