Canadian indie-rock heroes, Wolf Parade, have announced details of their third album, as well as debuted much of it live at their first show in two years.
When we separately interviewed Wolf Parade co-singers
Dan Boeckner and
Spencer Krug back in August 2009, their seemed to be no firm plans for Wolf Parade. Back then, Boeckner was about to be in town with partner Alexis Perry as Handsome Furs, (
live review) while Krug was spruiking his new Sunset Rubdown album
Dragonslayer (
review). Boeckner
waxed about approaching a new Wolf Parade record ("...in November we’re gonna get together and make a third album and everyone’s really excited about it. I think it actually helps Wolf Parade survive as a band. I think if these other things weren’t happening then that band wouldn’t exist anymore. I think we just would’ve imploded.") while Krug was
more elusive ("I don’t know if we’ll start on a new record, but we’ll start playing together again in November. We’ve been on a break all this year so Dan and I could focus on other things. We’ll take it from there.")
Well it seems that November proved a frutiful month. The band have nearly finished work on their third record, which according to a
new interview with Boeckner on Pitchfork, may be a double-album named after a world fair:
Pitchfork: In an Exclaim interview, you said that it could turn out to be a double album.
DB: Yeah. We started writing in late October or early November, and we ended up writing about 15 songs . We tracked all of them. So we got about 80 minutes of music to work into a product, basically [laughs], into something. At this point, I don't know whether it'll be a double album. I'd really love to just release a single album and then, later on, an extended EP. But we're still trying to figure out what format to put all the stuff out in. We want to release it all. I don't feel that any of the songs are ugly cousins or duds. [laughs]
Pitchfork: Do you have a title for the album yet?
DB: The title for the record, as far as we know now, is-- unless we get sued for using it-- Expo 86.
Expo 86 was a World's Fair that happened in Vancouver in 1986. It's been this thing we all talked about as a band. We all grew up in British Columbia, and we were all at Expo, which lasted about three or four days. It's a weird little thought experiment-- basically, we were all young children at the same big event. I remember Expo 86 was as big as the Olympics were this year in Vancouver. They completely reorganized part of the downtown core, and they built this giant geodesic dome called "Science World". Now it looks completely, totally dated and a product of its time. They built monuments, built rides. It was something I don't think we're going to see in Canada ever again because World's Fairs have fallen out of favor, at least for the Western World. (Read the rest of the interview
here).
"Expo 86" is tentatively due out in June/July via Sub Pop. Though you might not have to wait that long to hear new stuff. The band celebrated April Fools by kicking off a tour in Quebec, in their home country of Canada, where according to fans (and the
setlist) they played 6-7 new songs. Which
according to attendee and forum fan xrenelevesque7 were largely "synth-heavy" and involved "non-linear clapalongs". That's what we like to hear:
AS for the new stuff...
It was moderately awesome. Whoever said Depeche Mode was right on the money. It's very Synth-heavy, with Dan & Dante intermittently punching in some riffs & loops on keyboards. Whoever said "short songs," though, was not on the money. The songs were not short in the least (at least, they didn't seem short to me.) Complex and knotty, yes. And they did all have a similar vibe to them. The best way I can describe it is this ... they've kept (and builded [sic] upon) the progginess of Zoomer but re-injected some of the brashness of Apologies. Many of them began with crazy, funky, evil synth riffs and developed non-linearly into singalongs/shoutalongs/clapalongs. Also, while Dan & Spencer clearly lead their own material, as always, they do also sing their own parts all over the other one's business, as Dan claimed in that recent interview. Paradoxically, the best songs (on first impression) were the ones with Dan on lead vocal (especially the last one, new song #7!) but it was often what Spencer was doing in those songs that made them so amazing. He has a few new synths in his rig and does some mindblowingly virtuosic shiznat. At its worst, the new material felt aimlessly proggy and hook-less, like the worst parts of Zoomer. At its best, it felt like an appropriate blend of Zoomer's experimental complexity and Apologies' ramshackle catchiness ... with tons of energy ... and some new elements of course...
Sweet!. New sounds from the tour are yet to surface, but there's fan footage of
Apologies To The Queen Mary classic, 'I'll Believe In Anything' from Wolf Parade's first show in two years, at l'Impérial de Québec in Canada. Judging from the crowd reaction, they were sorely missed.
Wolf Parade - 'I'll Believe In Anything' (live at l'Impérial de Québec - April 2010)