Three Imaginary Girls - Wolf Parade

Flickr photo of the day: Wolf Parade

imaginary liz — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:15:59 +0000

Last night's *surprise* Wolf Parade / Foals show must have been a *surprise* hoot! Anyone feel like filling us in on the *surprise* fun?

Sub Pop 20: Wolf Parade

imaginary chona — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:57:07 +0000

13 Jul 2008

sp20wolfparade.jpg

Sunday night marked my first time seeing Canadian indie rock band Wolf Parade live in concert. I’m not totally familiar with the band’s music, but I’ve always harbored a strange fascination with the band’s name. I mean, really... a wolf parade... a parade of wolves? That just sounds like so much fun! I’m more familiar with guitarist/vocalist Dan Boeckner’s other project, Handsome Furs.

The Canadian five-piece put on a captivating and flowing long set. The vocals were handsome, the energy was definitely pumping, and the instrumentals were majestic.

Since Wolf Parade was the final listed band for SP20, at the end of their set it was announced that “Sub Pop Band” -- drum roll please -- Wolf Parade would be ending the night with an encore. The boys ended the night with a beautiful rendition of “I’ll Believe In Anything.” Though not the superstar ending some expected, it was a lovely way to end a beautiful weekend, as the many that waited for a potential surprise guest filtered out of Redmond’s Marymoor Park could attest.

Though I must question Sub Pop’s decision to have Wolf Parade headline Sunday, there is no doubt in my mind that the weekend was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had at a music festival. I loved Marymoor and was glad that I got to see so many bands that by no means were even really even together before the festival. “You see this here?” an acquaintance of mine asked as he gestured towards the main stage late Sunday afternoon. “This is never going to happen again.”

I kept his words in mind as I followed through the day, trying to take in as much as possible. Sub Pop is a part of Seattle history, and I am so glad that I got to be a part of the celebration. Happy birthday, Sub Pop!

The Canadian five-piece put on a captivating and flowing long set. The vocals were handsome, the energy was definitely pumping, and the instrumentals were majestic.

Wolf Parade AND Foals tonight!

ChrisB — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:25:00 +0000

For a couple of weeks now, Neumo's said they were hosting a show with "Super Special Secret Guests" and the obvious speculation was that it was Wolf Parade. It was kind of a relief that I was both first and correct - mostly because it would have been a terrible thing to have been wrong about. Yes, it's true, Wolf Parade are playing at Neumo's tonight.

The big surprise, though, is that so are Foals.

Tickets, I hear, are going very fast and you can get them here for $17+ some fees. Doors are at 8, show at 9, 21+.

New Wolf Parade album?

Cal Ledbetter — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:55:24 +0000

Can't wait for a new Wolf Parade album? (Me neither.) But you're going to have to. According to Subpop, Wolf Parade won't have a new album out till the "first half of 2008."

Apologies to the Queen Mary

Billy Corazon — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 07:00:00 +0000

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AMJDJC/wwwthreeimagi-20

wolfparade05oct.jpg

Watching Wolf Parade open for their fellow Quebecois pop-geniuses The Arcade Fire recently, I was mightily compelled to lean over to my show-going companion for the evening and observe, "They sound like early U2 playing 'Born To Run' era Bruce Springsteen. That's not a bad thing at all, but, I mean, it's totally what it sounds like," which said companion laughed to pitch a fit and said, "Holy fuck, you are totally right."

This is what it is to be a record reviewer, by the way. Your brain is constantly coming up with these ridiculous referential formulas to describe what is essentially indescribable in words — "Sounds like Brian Eno and Mission of Burma exchanging gunfire in the burned out husk of a post-apocalyptic Zurich," "Sounds like the Talking Heads being violently sodomized by Diamanda Galas in a sunny field of daisies during a full solar eclipse." Etcetera, ad nauseum. And I just totally made those up off the top of my head. You end up feeling like Greil Marcus doing a Dennis Miller impersonation.

But I totally digress. Point being, it is a true comparison and it isn't a bad thing. Especially live, they have the same kind of sweeping, epic scale of Da Boss in his glory days, filtered through the shimmering, tightly coiled, propulsive quality of U2 when they were actually good, although that may also have to do with the fact that guitarist / singer Dan Boeckner has a vocal delivery that falls somewhere between Bono and, strangely enough, Beck when he's actually singing. Splitting lead vocal duties with Boeckner is keyboardist Spencer Krug, whose own vocal style often evokes that yelp-y thing that Isaac Brock and the guy from The Shins do, which makes sense inasmuch as that Brock produced this album. And while that particular singing style usually makes me want to scrape my frontal lobe with a fucking fork, in this case the overall songwriting is consistently engaging enough that it actually becomes texturally interesting rather than irritating.

From the stutter-start piano and just-under-the-surface menace of "You Are A Runner and I Am My Father's Son," to the intoxicating, propulsive, keyboard-driven rock of "We Built Another World" and "Fancy Claps," to the anthemic glory of the album's three stand out tracks, "Shine A Light," " I'll Believe In Anything," and "This Heart's On Fire," the variety brought to the band by the presence of two top-notch singer / songwriters adds immensely to the individual personality of each song and keeps the listener enthusiastically guessing throughout this stellar album.

The variety brought to the band by the presence of two top-notch singer / songwriters adds immensely to the individual personality of each song and keeps the listener enthusiastically guessing throughout this stellar album.

Wolf Parade EP

Chris Estey — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 07:00:00 +0000

7.2

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009WV2YW/wwwthreeimagi-20

wolfparade05jul.jpg

They call them teasers for a reason. Extended plays — something like sides with out-takes attached? When they were twelve inches and on vinyl and not on ready made ironic silver circle wall art scrap, they had a reason-for-existence in the post-New Romantic era, when obese dyed black grooves allowed for the faintest bass note and loudest tom-tom pound to resonate through your down-hall neighbor's floor.

But then there's content: Then, as now. And some Eps, maxi-singles, whatever you call these teasers, were sometimes more than the mediums themselves. No, don't get me wrong, it was rare: Gang of Four's immortal 'yellow' later attached to Entertainment Romeo Void's debut sampler for Never Say Never — they not only sounded great, they were great in themselves. The music genuinely moved you, angry and erotic and against anything natural, lyrics not lost in the mystery, but the sound of human distance itself.

Here's a little compact disc recorded in Montreal, as unsexy as they come, as uninteresting as a few spreadsheets passed between departments. The cover art and the name of the band is useless, begs the thing to be left in the pile. When I first put it in I heard Isaac Brock, producer of half of Wolf Parade's four-song announcement for the upcoming Apologies to the Queen Mary possibly trying to redeem himself for his own success — unnecessary, of course, though a few frat boys cutting in line ahead of you at Trader Joe's drunkenly warbling "Float On" might sometimes strike you otherwise.

It played. "You don't need to do that new wave thing," I found myself saying, making coffee in the kitchen. "We don't all have to pretend like we grew up on early T. Heads." That was 10 AM.

I check the poop sheet: Bandless but Juno-4 owning Spencer Krug was asked to open a show for the Arcade Fire, enlisted his pal Dan to collaborate in his apartment, drumming their demos through computer speakers — which sorta explains the mechanical-man aspect of the rhythm section. They ended up rehearsing only one day before their first show, and that in itself might be a testament to spontaneity. (And why do so many interesting bands have to borrow gear while you never want to hear the guy who works at Guitar World play?)

As I listened the voice stopped being faux nervous. It started to sound like this guy — who is this guy? Dan Boeckner, used to be in something called Atlas Strategic, possibly an Ayn Rand tribute band? — well, it started to sound like he had something to say. The Brock influence is there in the opening gospel-jangle of "Shine A Light," but soon just becomes part of the carving knife robot rock of "You Are A Runner," and the obvious twiddling and shuffle-drums root-squared with Cowboys International and the poppier side of Public Image ("Disco Sheets"), the two chord damnation blues of "Lousy Pictures." This ain't the cheap grace of floating on; this is the importance of "throwing rocks at the sky."

But the something being said has something to do with waiting, with feeling barely alive while life falls all around you, keeping scores no one else knows about, offices full of meaningless busyness, public transportation running on fuel made by ground-up souls, our fossilized essences frozen from the future, a future that will never arrive, so we can't sleep, can't sleep till it's light, the judgment day in the back of our minds, the letter opener they left in us our only weapon.

It's a slice of mock opera that refused to leave my stereo today — and will find its way there often till Sub Pop puts out Apologies to Queen Mary early this fall.