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| TRACKLIST |
| 1. Soldier's Grin -. . . . . . .4:38 2. Call It a Ritual -. . . . . .2:47 3. Language City - . . . . . . .5:03 4. Bang Your Drum -. . . . . . .3:12 5. California Dreamer -. . . . .6:02 6. The Grey Estates -. . . . . .3:28 7. Fine Young Cannibals -. . . .6:33 8. An Animal in Your Care -. . .4:21 9. Kissing the Beehive -. . . .10:46 |
Rollingstone.com: Championed by Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, this Montreal band is the product of two fiercely creative minds that come together in a beautiful mess. Singer-keyboardist Spencer Krug delivers exuberantly spasmodic rants (see his side project Sunset Rubdown), singer-guitarist Dan Boeckner tends toward more straightforward brooding yelps (see his side project Handsome Furs), and their colleagues somehow hold it all together. The result is synth-powered rock that's both primal and chaotic. "Soldier's Grin" is a twitchy New Wave speed waltz with a roots-rock breakdown; "Call It a Ritual" is a steam-punk ballad with heavy echo and guitar tantrums; the keyboard-driven "Fine Young Cannibals" sounds more like Roxy Music than its namesake. But the parade is most thrilling when it becomes a stampede. Check out "Kissing the Beehive," 11 minutes of fist-pumping prog-rock march rhythms with heraldic synthesizer chords and a disco high-hat undertow. It's largely indecipherable, totally animalistic and frequently breathtaking.
Subpop.com: Recorded and engineered by drummer Arlen Thompson, At Mount Zoomer is Wolf Parades second album for Sub Pop. Their first, Apologies to the Queen Mary, came out in the fall of 2005 and was described by Uncut magazine as, frequently appealing.
Singer/guitarist Dan Boeckner: After Apologies& we wrote about four or five new songs, but we decided to throw them out because they sounded too much like what wed already done. We could have easily made another Apologies& but what would have been the point? Instead, the band committed itself to a period of experimentation, recording long improvisational sessions in the Montreal church owned by The Arcade Fire. These tracks were then cut and pasted into discrete compositions. The result is a complex matrix of components and modules that, thanks to the collective efforts of each band member, never feels labored or fussy. From the nimble opening strains of Soldiers Grin to the eleven-minute aggro dirge of Kissing the Beehive, they hand authority of the songs around among them with a refreshing absence of ownership. Where Apologies& could be read as a good-natured, sweaty volleyball match between Boeckner and singer/keyboardist Spencer Krug, the new album shows the band as a fully coordinated moving front. This collaboration isnt just a work ethicthe bands many offshoots, side projects, and domestic ventures have taken each of them far from their home base in Montreal for extended periods, compressing their time as a functioning unit. Its hard enough to get us all in the same room at the same time, Krug said of the bands approach, so when we do get to write songs there isnt really time for our egos to get in the way.
The legion of bearded, sweater-vested critics will want to file this album under Prog Rock because it doesnt offer up sugary cast-offs for the short-attention-span set, but no one ever danced to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. It might instead be this generations Marquee Moon, or an indie rock Chinese Democracy released thirty years early and sixty million dollars under budget (and without cornrows, to boot). Better, though, to think of it as the sound of a band edging forward into a wispy darkness, one hand reaching out, the other firmly clutching the past.
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