First Impressions: Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

With the exception of the "I swear we'll record it this year, no seriously" new Wrens album* the 2008 record that I've most been anticipating is the follow up to Wolf Parade's Apologies To The Queen Mary. Notwithstanding that it's one of the finest albums of the decade, on top of that the band's 2 principle songwriters have since its release been responsible for writing 3 ¹/₃ fantastic records (Dan Boeckner made an album with his wife as The Handsome Furs last year and Spencer Krug has put out the second and third Sunset Rubdown albums as well as writing about 33% of Swan Lake's Beast Moans with Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes and Destroyer's Dan Bejer). Despite really liking those records though whenever I listened to them I felt somewhat that they were missing each other. Plague Park didn't have the sort of hooks that Krug excels at and I can't help but wonder how some of the more bombastic moments of the 2 Sunset Rubdown albums would sound if they had snatches of Boeckner's bestial guitar playing cutting through them.

So after a lengthy gestation period which saw the band write and reject a number of songs that sounded too much like what they've done before along comes At Mount Zoomer, written during lengthy improvisational sessions held in the same converted church outside Montreal which Arcade Fire made Neon Bible in. And it really does sound like it was written during long improvisational sessions because there are times when it seems to be to be quite unfocussed. And at this point it doesn't seem to be as good as Apologies ..., nor for that matter anything else any of them have done since. That's not to say that it's a bad album, far from it. "Language City", "California Dreamer" and "Call It A Ritual" (a song I didn't particularly like when I first heard it a few weeks ago but which within the album itself works) are all fine songs but previously Wolf Parade have been at their best when they've written what are essentially pop songs, albeit ones that are unconventionally arranged.

They seem to have taken a deliberate step away from that sort of composing here and let themselves be a little less restricted in where they've taken the songs. The results are for the most part a little more flabby then they could have been had they edited the songs a little and cut a minute or so off of a few of them.

MP3: Wolf Parade - An Animal In Your Care from At Mount Zoomer. Removed at the request of Sub Pop records.
MP3: Wolf Parade - Call it a ritual from At Mount Zoomer.

* Why must you taunt me so Mexico? How have I displeased you?