Track Listing

1. You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son
2. Modern World
3. Grounds For Divorce
4. We Built Another World
5. Fancy Claps
6. Same Ghost Every Night
7. Shine a Light
8. Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts
9. I'll Believe in Anything
10. It's a Cure
11. Dinner Bells
12. This Heart's on Fire

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12740 in Music
• Brand: Dig
• Released on: 2005-09-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .11 pounds

Album Description
This Montreal band has toured with the likes of Modest Mouse and The Arcade Fire, they played last year's All Tomorrow's Parties festival in California, self-released two limited edition EPs, and have a song (a cover of Frog Eyes' "Claxxon's Lament") on The Believer magazine's recent covers comp. Time magazine picked "Apologies..." as one of "Canada's Most Anticipated Indie Albums Of The Year". Expect to see and hear much more from Wolf Parade.

Amazon.com
On first listen, Wolf Parade is just another Canadian buzz band that plays fun, keyboard-heavy, new wave-y indie-rock and sings in weird, affected, high-pitched tones. Upon further listening, the songs reveal a lot of strange and fuzzy little details, and the lyrics have more depth than most bands do on their debuts. The Montreal-based group was brought to the Seattle-based Sub Pop label's attention by none other than Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, modern rock radio's king of affected vocalizings. Brock even recorded much of the album in Portland, OR. The vocalist has more than a passing affinity for David Bowie, and if you love the Arcade Fire and Frog Eyes, you probably are already a fan. Apologies is a very fun debut; the studied strangeness of the singing grates less over time, and it'll be really interesting to see what they come up with next. –Mike McGonigal

Harp
"a defiantly unpredictable band seemingly intent on giving indie-rock orthodoxy and epic kick in the shins."

Customer Reviews

My apologies!
I heard the first buzz from Wolf Parade (from another Subpop group) months before their album landed in the indie media's lap.

By the next time I'd heard of them, they were being hailed as the Next Great Thing, with their quirky, catchy pop music and off-kilter vocals. They are also massively hyped as the next big indie thing, after Arcade Fire and alongside Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Fortunately they are also enormous fun to listen to -- think the dancier little brother of Modest Mouse.

"Apologies to the Queen Mary" opens with a clamorous drum solo that sets up a "boom da boom" carnival sound. Then the oddball sound is completed when Spencer Krug starts warbling that you are a runner, and he is his father's son. I can't quite make out what he's saying except for those lines, but it's a wonderfully colorful song that gets grounded by some gritty guitar.

Having successfully hooked in the listener, they segue into transcendent guitar pop, bouncy indie rock that will have you tapping your foot, shimmery ballads, synthy dance melodies, and mournful rock song that slowly waltzes around in a flutter of electric organ. "Same Ghost Every Night" is the peak of this album, and that sound should be explored in future albums.

It ends with the upbeat-sounding, but sad-themed "This Heart's on Fire," where Dan Boeckner does his best imitation with Beck. It's a raw, painful song under all the catchiness, since it is apparently about the death of Boeckner's mother, and you can hear the sorrow in his voice as he sings.

No, it's not genius, and the media will seize another hot young band soon. But Wolf Parade may well be around without them, because they have enough weirdness and musical skill to stick in your mind after the album ends. And instead of a signature sound, they explore different kinds of songs -- mostly with success.

Rather than trying for catchiness alone, they weave the catchiness with waves of sound and a folky edge. Buzzing guitars get to mesh with carnival twinkling and sweeps of electronic organ, and form madly complex, colorful pop tunes... which just happen to be catchy. Think Olivia Tremor Control meets Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Krug and Boeckner share vocal duty on various songs, and I have to say I prefer Boeckner's raw, smooth voice. Krug's voice tends toward a melodramatic warble. When he's singing, he seems to destabilize the songs he's in, while Boeckner does the reverse.

While Krug's warbly voice will be a turnoff for some, "Apologies to the Queen Mary" is a fun, colorful pop album, and definitely something worth checking out. Hype or no hype.

A Two-Headed Wolf is Better Than One
The Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock connection, the David Bowiesque vocals, the Arcade Fire friendship. Yep, all true, but the real story is the music on Wolf Parade's debut, Apologies to the Queen. The opening track, "You Are a Runner and I am My Father's Son" kicks off with hypnotic "boom... da-dum-da, boom... da-dum-da " percussion that plunges the listener into a circus-like bliss (unfortunately not repeated elsewhere). Then the creativity waters down a little before re-surging on track 5, "Fancy Claps." Appropriately titled for its deliciously placed clap-along at the end, this is the fastest song on the album and the only one to dip its toes in punk. But the real, real story is the dueling sing-off between the alternating writers/lead vocalists/frontmen: Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner. Up until the early underground favorite, "Shine a Light" (track 7-written and sung by Boeckner), the better and more exciting vocalist, Krug, is the victor. But from "Shine a Light" on, it's the more insightful and passionate Boeckner who rallies. On the final track, "This Heart's on Fire," sounding a tad like Beck, Boeckner wails with transparent pain about his mother's passing, but tries to cheer himself up by repeating "It's getting better all the time" over and over. Since both leading men seem to draw on vastly different experiences, they essentially produced two intertwined albums in one. If the Krug/Boeckner collaboration can live with that and not allow their egos to strangle their music's pathos, fans can probably expect an exquisite follow-up.

Stop with all the comparisions people
Stop the madness! Wolf Parade vs. Arcade Fire vs. Modest Mouse vs. Tom Waits vs. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah vs. Wilco vs. Bloc Party vs. The Decemberist vs. M Ward vs. Franz Ferdinand vs. everything else you can imagine. Oh yeah, and Dan Bejar sounds like David Bowie, and George Bush is Einstein.

Wolf Parade is a fine album. Listen to it and decide for yourself; they sound like Clay Aiken eating a doughnut in France on a Wednesday in spring on a park bench next to an old lady with a blue hat who smells musty.