Review Summary: Back in flannel.
Cynical cash-in or a genuine attempt to get some long dormant creative juices flowing? Reunion events like Canadian indie rock legends Wolf Parade’s five-night stand this week at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom could be taken both ways; at this point, the difference between either is practically negligible when comebacks are an expected part of the life cycle of any band that has had a modicum of success, cultish or otherwise. And anyways, can a return after a six-year hiatus be considered an actual reunion? When I reviewed
Expo 86 in 2010 for this site (hold on a sec while I vomit everywhere), I wrote about the feeling of well-loved bands not standing up to the colossal structures they build up in your youth’s mind, nostalgia not only softening the edges but making everything seem bigger, better – and whether that unfairly taints everything after. 2005’s
Apologies for the Queen Mary was a titanic, classic record for a time when, as Pitchfork recently noted, “the term ‘indie rock’ closely correlated to a specific set of sounds, and a certain prevalence in music culture.” I couldn't care less about the destruction of the term as anything remotely descriptive – if it ever truly was – what I do care about is today there is a new Wolf Parade release, and that worry I had when listening to
Expo 86 has long since been washed away by the years. Listening to
EP4, I feel that same rush the ramshackle charm of
Apologies still brings me.
When Spencer Krug sings mournfully on “C’est La Vie Way,” “when you’re listening to a mixtape from your friends / do you miss them?”, there’s a knowing grin behind the mic. For a few minutes, that feeling, of discovering something wonderful and realizing there is a whole crowd of people out there, also singing along to this song, is here, again. The record is a messy one, but that is part of its appeal: when “C’est La Vie Way” abruptly downshifts into an odd half-time after the synth-pop surge of its first couple verses, you can almost imagine the band stumbling across this in the studio and deciding to run with it. While Krug and Dan Boeckner have kept plenty busy in the intervening years (Boeckner with Divine Fits and Handsome Furs, Krug with Moonface and Sunset Rubdown, both with countless other miscellaneous credits), the way they slip into that singular Wolf Parade aesthetic sounds as effortless as putting on a particularly well-worn pair of boots. Fans will recognize the rampaging guitar threads spiraling anxiously all over “Automatic” and the crystal clear melodies offset by steadily busy rhythm work and a taut control of dynamics on “Mr. Startup.” Yet there is a more pronounced appreciation for pop songwriting here, glammier production paired with the dense, jittery, and apprehensive lyrics that are, at this point, in their DNA. At its worst,
EP4 is too scattershot to serve a cohesive message, like when the jarring shift on Boeckner’s “Floating World” leads to two songs spliced clumsily together. The record as a whole maintains a very sketchbook feel to it – but it should. As an EP for the band to dip their toes back into the creative process of being a band again, it’s a thrilling piece of work, a preface to their national run of live shows and, well, whatever comes after that. Because while
EP4 makes for a mighty fine mixtape, one certainly hopes they won’t stop there.
