Wolf Parade

By Spencer Patterson

Thursday, June 19, 2008 | midnight

As good as Wolf Parade’s first full-length album, 2005’s Apologies to the Queen Mary might be—and it’s great, really, one of the must-hear releases of the 2000s—it feels like a bit of a cheat. After all, eight of its 12 songs had been previously released over three earlier EPs, giving the Montreal indie outfit an atypical opportunity to rework its best material prior to laying down final versions.

Follow-up At Mount Zoomer was afforded no such special allowances, one possible reason the band took three long years to deliver it (separate side-project LPs from songwriters Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner in the interim being another). Still, as such, it provides a clearer picture of Wolf Parade’s actual capabilities, which, it’s now plainly apparent, are as immense as Apologies led the world to believe.

Though Zoomer can’t boast an individual song as heart-stoppingly brilliant as “Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts” or “I’ll Believe in Anything,” it manages to up the overall ante, primarily by melding Krug’s artsiness and Boeckner’s rootsiness in a way heretofore unheard. Without looking at the credits, it’s tough to guess which man wrote darting opener “Soldier’s Gun” (Boeckner), synthy stomp “California Dreaming” (Krug) or labyrinthian 11-minute finisher “Kissing the Beehive” (both).

Admittedly, a couple of tracks (“Call It a Ritual,” “The Grey Estates”) blend into the background a bit, but every other cut features something extra special—the philosophical lyricism of “Bang Your Drum” (“Do they beat that drum to get you back home/Or do they beat it to keep you away?”), the evolving keyboard boogie in “Fine Young Cannibals,” the anthemic guitar riff toward the end of “Animal in Your Care”—that proudly proclaims that this remains one Parade well worth lining up for.

The bottom line: ****