“This Heart’s on Fire”
from the album Apologies to the Queen Mary
2005
iTunes
The hype machine, when it points its finger at a band, rarely does that band any lasting favors — any subsequent success comes despite the inevitable backlash and accusations of overratedness. Following hard on a period of much-fawned-over Arcade Fires and Broken Social Scenes, Montrealers Wolf Parade would seem to be merely the next shift of overpraised Canadian musicians — the flavor of the week, in a phrase. It doesn’t help that Wolf Parade has a decidedly Arcade Fire-esque Bowie-by-way-of-Modest Mouse vibe; you can hear it in Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug’s flamboyantly rough-hewn singing, in the angular, explosive song structures, in the lyrics that are just obscure enough to be open to interpretation.
However, bands don’t hook the music press literati by copying other groups, and Wolf Parade are no exception. Their secret weapons are Hadji Bakara and Spencer Krug’s keyboards and electronics, which soften Boecker’s rough guitar edges with plonking analog melodies and rich held-out undernotes. The songs themselves are equally arresting, especially with repeated listens. Apologies literally starts off with a bang (and a big hi-hat rattle), as delivered through the mid-tempo bombast of “You Are a Runner and I am My Father’s Son.” If its rhythms are jerky and ultra-defined, “The Modern World” is a smoothed-out driving song, its vocal harmonies evoking a vague melancholy. Boeckner and Krug trade off on the mic; their styles, while distinct from one another, are complementary enough to gather the variety of moods into a cohesive whole. Wolf Parade balance Apologies to the Queen Mary between uptempo hook-fests like “This Heart’s on Fire,“ with its Cars-like keyboard line and noddable riffs, and slower numbers like the echoes-of-the-fifties pop ballad “Same Ghost Every Night.”
Apologies to the Queen Mary is almost an hour long, and there are certainly portions of it that aren’t essential… but it’s difficult to see where any fat could have been cut, as each track has its own fractured beauty. The band indulges in a lengthy outro for the lovely “Dinner Bells,” but it wouldn’t be the same song without it.
Critics have a tendency to academicize music, which is one cause of today’s darlings becoming tomorrow’s obscurities. Music that charms people who like to dissect and analyze doesn’t necessarily light a fire under those who just wanna dance. Apologies to the Queen Mary has plenty to offer both camps — but whether it’s an album for the ages is up to the ages.