Wolf Parade Live Review
The Concorde 2, Brighton
17/05/2010
Montreal bands are cool; it’s a given. Yet Wolf Parade may have damaged their credentials after spending the afternoon on Brighton beach playing a game called ‘rock on rock’. The premise is simple, front man Dan Boeckner explains: “You throw a rock up and try and hit it with another rock.”
Thankfully, Wolf Parade’s music remains undeniably cool. And judging by tracks aired tonight from forthcoming album, Expo 86, it’s going to stay that way. The new material sits somewhere between the stripped-down delights of debut, Apologies to Queen Mary It’s A Curse, and the Television-esque prog of At Mount Zoomer. Despite the four-piece insisting on “getting them out of the way,” they are clearly enjoying playing the new tracks. And why not? They are fast, theatrical, and a damn sight less bloated than those on Mount Zoomer. Spencer Krug’s keyboards are still prominent, but it is Boeckner’s clean guitar lines that lift tracks such as Two Men in New Tuxedos. The pair seem happy to be performing together again, especially when they battle head-on to turn California Dreamers into a menacing rock epic.
Some of the new tracks, however, verge on the bombastic and lack a sense of urgency. It was after all the urgency of Wolf Parade’s 2005 debut that made it so refreshing. Thankfully, a sizeable chunk of Apologies… is performed tonight with the anthemic Shine a Light and I Believe in Anything delivered with frenetic energy. The early material fares better overall with the vocals and grooves given more space to work, like on the exhilarating Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts.
Ultimately, Wolf Parade use the density of their sound to stretch each song to its full potential. At their best, they sound like the aural equivalent of two drunks fighting in a phone box: a heady scrap of driving synths, jerky guitar, and vocal warble. It remains to be seen if Expo 86 will deliver the knock-out blow.
