Free Matador sampler

Matador have kindly made an autumn label sampler called Intended Play available. Seven of the songs haven’t been released as MP3 before. Read their original post here. If you like a song, support the artists and buy the album.

The Fucked Up song is a beast, their album The Chemistry of Common Life is one of my favourite albums of the year. Can’t wait to see what’s on the Brighten Corners reissue too so I’m looking forward to that in December.

Download the Intended Play sampler.

Track listing:

1. A.C. Newman - There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve (from Get Guilty, due out January 20)
2. Belle and Sebastian - The State I Am In (BBC Version) (from The BBC Sessions, due out November 18)
3. Jennifer O’Connor - Here With Me (from Here With Me, released August 19)
4. Shearwater - The Snow Leopard (Remastered) from Rook, released June 3)
5. Lou Reed - Caroline Says, Pt. II (Live) (from Berlin: Live At St. Ann’s Warehouse, due out November 4)
6. Mogwai - The Sun Smells Too Loud (from The Hawk Is Howling, released September 23)
7. Fucked Up - No Epiphany (from The Chemistry Of Common Life, released October 7)
8. Jay Reatard - An Ugly Death (from Matador Singles ‘08, released October 7)
9. Jaguar Love - Humans Evolve Into Skyscrapers (from Take Me To The Sea, released August 19)
10. Pavement - Cataracts (from Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed., due out December 9)
11. Brightblack Morning Light - Oppressions Each (from Motion To Rejoin, released September 23)
12. Times New Viking - Call & Respond (from the Stay Awake EP, released October 14)
13. Condo Fucks - What’cha Gonna Do About It? (from Fuckbook, due out March 2009)

Let’s Write Reviews, Like It’s 1995…

I’m following Bobby’s lead here, and posting up a review I did a while ago for the yet-possibly-neverto-be-released Underground Wires. The premise was that all the albums reviewed in the ‘zine were to be from 1995, and the reviews had to be written from the perspective of one living in said year. Riveting? Probably not. Pretentious? Fuck yeah. So, I give you- Alanis Morissette- Jagged Little Pill

Morissette’s debut L.P. covers a large swathe of lyrical territory as yet un-mined by modern female songwriters. Topics such as irony, lifestyle recommendations and domestic maintenance assail the listener’s ears, demanding to be acknowledged and appreciated. However, Morissette’s self-righteousness doesn’t go down easy. Hers is a jagged pill indeed, and the album’s single love song – ‘Head Over Feet’ doesn’t provide enough sugar to coat her noveau-feminist bile.

Side A begins with her list of demands, in the form of ‘All I Really Want’. Ms Morissette wishes for ‘some peace man. A place to find a common ground.’ It would appear that Morissette is unwilling to take responsibility for her own actions, and to take an active role in forming her own destiny. ‘All I Really Want’ is less a manifesto of wants, more a whinge-list of things she wants done. ‘You Oughta Know’ sees Morissette reminding her erstwhile lover that ‘I’m here to remind you/ of the mess you left when you went away’. Presumably her beau didn’t do the dishes before leaving for work in the morning. Why Ms Morissette can’t clean up the mess herself is left unexplained. When Side B opens, Alanis calms down (being angry is very tiring) and concedes that one must learn how to roll with life’s ups, and downs. The mood becomes less angsty, more cod-philosophical. ‘You Learn’ is filled with regrets posing as life lessons. She recommends ‘getting your heart trampled on’, ‘biting off more than you can chew’ and ‘sticking your foot into your mouth’. Fair enough, but when these axioms are placed next to other recommendations such as ‘walking around naked in your living room’ one begins to question their validity. Alanis is adamant though, that life offers ample opportunity for learning. The situations in which can learn are startling in their abundance. One can learn while grieving, choking, laughing, choosing, praying, asking, bleeding, loving, crying, losing, screaming, and most transcendentally of all, one can learn while living. ‘You Learn’ is but the tip of Ms Morissette’s contemplative iceberg, however. ‘Ironic’ is 4 verses, 3 repeated choruses, and an outro of linguistic incompetence. Irony is the outcome of events contrary to what might have been expected. As Perry White said in last week’s episode of ‘Lois and Clark’- ‘a fly in your Chardonnay? That’s not irony, that’s just bad luck.’ Irony is neither ‘a traffic jam when you’re already late’ nor is it ‘rain on your wedding day’. These are examples of bad planning ensuing from passivity, not of irony. One can only presume that the bride and the frustrated motorist had followed Side A’s Alanis’s example of whinging instead of acting, resulting in unhappiness for all. They can always learn from their misfortune though, I’m sure.

The instrumentation on the album is sparse- guitars, harmonicas, drums and organs- and mostly played by Morissette herself. Surprisingly, Dave Navarro and Flea guest on ‘You Oughta Know’, accounting for the heavy guitars and above-average bass line on the track. Glen Ballard’s (credited in the liner notes as being Morissette’s ‘spiritual brother’) production is clean, and allows every one of Morissette’s yodels and yelps to come through clean in the mix. Though the album is lyrically flawed, the few stand-out tracks such as ‘You Oughta Know’ and ‘Head Over Feet’ coupled with the current vogue for disillusioned female singer/songwriters, will surely push Morissette towards mainstream popularity.

Not another biopic!

Honestly, I’m not quite sure how this slipped under my radar. They’ve only gone and made a film about the life of Christopher Wallace, or The Notorious B.I.G. I won’t lie - this prospect fills me with dread. 11 years might be a sufficient gap before they make a film about the man, but that doesn’t mean it has to be done.

The trailer plays out with some snippets of Biggie songs, like Juicy and Hypnotize, but the lead track is the posthumously released Notorious. Of course.

The dialogue is sickening, as characters utter clichéd movie lines as appalling as “you not goin’ back on the block - not if I take this bid fo’ yo ass” and “Can’t change the world unless we change ourselves.” Quite.

A quick glance at the casting shows that they’ve gone with unknowns, which is probably a good idea, although Anwan Glover (aka Slim from The Wire) should make for an excellent Snoop Dogg.

Who knows. It could be great. I’ll wager, however, that it won’t be.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND BUST UP!

VW, reeling from the Deerhunter singer’s vicious diatribe against them on the pages of Analogue magazine, say: “Bradford was nice to us in person.”

More on this in the next issue of Analogue. Keep it tuned here folks.

(Sincere apologies to our readership for this post).

El Guincho - gorila contra bear mix

El Guincho has made a mix of obscure songs from all over the world for Gorilla Vs Bear. Listen above or go to the original post and download it.

Maple Drive Available for Download

Maple Drive by Storkboy Choons and Colours Move is now available for download. The album came free with issue 4 of Analogue. I know I’m sort of biased because Analogue released it but I do think that it’s some of the strongest Irish electronica produced this year. Have a listen and decide for yourself… Leave a comment letting us know what you think.

M83 interview

Nostalgia is a more potent drug than novelty. It doesn’t matter how good, how exciting, how different a new album is, it will never take you by the shoulders and bring a tear to your eye, as it projects grainy old camcorder videos of the mind onto your bedroom wall. Everything is a little hazy, a little more perfect than it was in reality. But that’s the whole idea. You don’t love those teenage records because they really were that good (for the most part). You love them for the memories, for that feeling. For Anthony Gonzalez, also known as M83, his own very specific experience of being a teenager in the 1980s became the main influence for his most recent album, Saturdays=Youth.

“I think that 80s music is such a brilliant period for music history. It was the occasion for me to do a tribute to this 80s music, but also a tribute to my teenage years. Because the main theme of the album is being a teenager, and being a teenager means a lot to me.” A passing listen to Saturdays=Youth will reveal the heavy influence of bands such as Tears For Fears, Ultravox and Cocteau Twins. The areas Gonzalez mines aren’t what would be conventionally thought of as cool, even in as revisionist a decade as ours. But that’s not the point. This is pure liquid memories. “I had… no, I still have a lot of good memories of me being a teenager. The album was just a way to do a tribute to this period of my life that was so important to me.”

Beneath the surface, the central influence is the work of filmmaker John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink). It’s not unheard of for bands to cite filmmakers as influences, but not so many manage to recreate the feeling of those films musically. Gonzalez, it has to be said, gets it to a tee. “My music is very cinematographic”, he says, responding to a question about the shape-shifting quality to his music that helps it defy categorisation. “Because one of the big influences for me is movies and cinema. And I like to change directions each time. I like to make my music evolve and to experiment with new sounds. I like to propose something different to people each time.”

When M83 first appeared on the scene in 2003 with Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts it was their shoegaze aesthetic that gained attention. Tracks like ‘Run Into Flowers’ (“Give me pills and chemicals/I wanna run into…”) combined the blissful joy of drug experiences with the trick of building everything up until it all just came together into one mesh of volume washing out of the speakers. But as time went by, M83 left MBV behind to an extent, changing from album to album, with 2007’s Digital Shades, Vol 1 providing quiet, ambient sounds. Genre-hopping is the order of the day for Gonzalez. I wonder if it’s as pre-meditated as could seem to the casual listener. “Not really. What I usually do is I first compose a lot of songs, maybe twenty or thirty songs. I just pick the ones which I think can be very close in terms of atmosphere and ambience. Really, I just create songs, and then after, I pick the songs I love for the album.”

Being an electronic artist from France, you would think Gonzalez would be more involved in the scenes that appear and recede periodically from the main cities, particularly Paris. He seems to prefer working in isolation however, in his own studio in his home-town of Antibes on the Mediterranean coast. “I just tried five years ago to move to Paris for two years and I didn’t like it. It was very difficult for me to create music in Paris. When I came back to the south, it was directly easier to do music. I don’t know, maybe it’s the atmosphere of the city, and I like to feel that the sea is close to me. I like the sun, and I like when it’s shining, I like the landscapes in the south of France, and I feel confident enough to create music here. It’s a strange thing to say, but that’s my place to make music.”

“It’s not a problem if you’re living in a small city, as long as you do what you want to do, and as long as you are honest with yourself and with your music I think it can work.” Stifling himself musically is not something that Gonzalez is likely to do any time soon. With skills capable of turning everything from My Bloody Valentine to Ultravox into immediate, compelling and profound music, it’s a given that M83 aren’t going to stop experimenting with sounds any time soon. Here’s wondering what colour the chameleon will turn next time.

M83 plays as part of DEAF in Vicar Street on the 24th of October.

Free Stuff Wednesday

Who wants to go to an exclusive Halfset gig on Friday? It’ll include a free cocktail, or five. We’ve got a pair of tickets to give away, right here, right now. Would you like them? If so, leave a comment with your name and email address. If you’re not in luck, then head over to The Hat’s Off and buy yourself a ticket. They only cost 20 quid, and it’s on in the Morrisson Hotel. Swank-ey.

Credit crunch record shopping

A few years ago the Sunday supplements carried a few hastily written articles about a phenomenon called ‘fifty quid man’. Fifty quid man was a product of the mid-decade, a Mondeo driving accountant or city worker with a high disposable income who would march into HMV every Thursday and smugly splash out a crisp fifty on a few DVDs and the latest Snow Patrol release. Oh, he was a record company’s wet dream, was fifty quid man. He kept Keane and Coldplay straddled atop the charts like a pair of hookers on a Man United player, and the EMI execs smiling. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) fifty quid man’s days are over. As, sadly, are those of his sounder cousin, twenty quid man. Recent apocalyptic happenings in the global financial system have rendered these poorly drawn demographic stereotypes redundant, so now is as good a time as any for Analogue to introduce a new one, fifty cent man.

If you thought that the thrill of rifling through a shelf of records and being on social welfare didn’t go hand in hand, think again. There is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of musical treats lying in wait in our country’s charity shops. Dublin’s North inner city, from Dorset Street to Capel Street, and around the Rathmines area on the Southside, are particularly rich hunting grounds for the dedicated record collector. All you need is a bit of patience. It’s a bit like shopping in TK Maxx, where you have to hoof your way through twenty pairs of luminous yellow, size 26 men’s jeans in order to find a pair that are blue and reach your shoes. Only in Oxfam, you have to flick through twenty copies of a CD called Finglas by a Dublin rapper called Spiral who once appeared on Big Brother (I kid you not, it’s everywhere) in order to strike gold and romp home with a two euro copy of The Who’s Live at Leeds. With all this in mind, I decide to set myself a challenge to venture forth and see what’s out there on a given day. I give myself a budget of twenty quid, (the rounded up average price of a CD album) and I set out into town with the cash in my pocket, an afternoon to spare, and an open mind. The plan is to see how many CDs, cassettes and records I can buy without breaking the budget, take them home for a good goin’ over, and write about the whole thing.

My first port of call is Gorta on Liffey Street. Gorta is not as upmarket as some of the other shops I visit, it’s Aldi to Oxfam’s Marks and Spencer. The shop smells and looks like it’s made out of mothballs, missing jig-saw pieces and amputated plastic doll’s limbs. Like most of the other shops I visit, the music section is located in a few big crates near the cash register. Stickers tell me that all CDs are either one euro or fifty cents and all cassettes and LPs are one or two euros. Welcome to bargainville. I dive into the crates like a pig in search of truffles. There is a lot of dross in the boxes. Aside from the CD cases that are simply empty, there are buckets of promotional CDs for dreary has-been dance outfits, and obscene amounts of Sunday newspaper promo CDs being sold back for 50 cent a pop. But hey, it’s all for charity, and if you plough through it, the gems start appearing. Ten minutes later I’m heading toward the next shop with three cassettes, two CDs and a vinyl. The price? A princely €6.50. After rooting around the next couple of shops on Capel street I make an observation. It would appear that one man’s treasure chest is another’s coffin. These cardboard crates of doom prove to be musty monuments to a plethora of failed British and Irish indie also-rans. Shed Seven, The Four of Us, Menswear, Babybird, Gene, they are all here, looking grim with cracked plastic casings falling from their hinges. Worryingly, The Flaws’ last album Achieving Vagueness is in Barnados for €2.90. I don’t buy it.

One fun thing about buying music on the cheap is the sheer recklessness that soon develops. Everything is so inexpensive that a goofy impulsiveness sets in. A novelty single by sinisterly shaped ITV children’s TV presenter Timmy Mallett for 50 cent? Why not? Vampire Weekend fan? Go straight to the source and grab a copy of King Sunny Adé and His African Beats on cassette for the price of a cornetto. Surely others are sucked into this world of foraging and reward?

What sort of person typically buys music in charity shops? I bravely attempt to quiz the only other dedicated shopper I meet today. A youngish Spanish dude is eagerly rifling through a box of musical detritus in Mrs Quinn’s charity shop. He starts to act defensively as I approach. He looks at me with a glaring intensity that seems to ask what the hell would I want with these shitty tapes, even though he’s all over them like a rash. I wait for him to finish so I can ask him if he, ahem, comes to this sort of place to look for music often? His name is Flavio and he tells me that no, he doesn’t. What sort of music does he like?
“R & B and rap, I like most. But there is very little here. This one is okay” he says, picking up a D12 rap album, “but it’s expensive”.
I look at the price. It’s €2.90. I agree that it’s probably about €2.90 too expensive for a D12 album. Seeing a quick opening to big up the Irish, I whip Spiral’s ubiquitous Finglas single out of a nearby CD box and tell Flavio it’s Irish rap and worth checking out. He eyes it suspiciously and shakes his head. By now he is looking at me as if I have three heads, so I slink out of the shop and homeward.

Arriving home I spread my haul across the floor to photograph it for Analogue. It looks pretty impressive, provided it all plays well (I remember getting ape-shit excited after buying a second hand cassette of The Beatles Revolver at the age of fourteen, only to be traumitised by John and Paul’s voices briefly warbling like Donald Duck every two seconds). There are fourteen items in total, meaning that I paid an average of €1.40 per item. Sweet. At prices like this, it’s no wonder I went a bit crazy, splashing out on MC Mallett. It’s time to pour a glass of red wine, haul out three different types of music player and get listening.

I play it safe first, sticking with what I know. I cycle through the tracks on The Mamas and The Papas live album, Glenn Campbell’s Greatest Hits CD, then through Steve Winwood’s Roll with it and Paul Simon’s Graceland on cassette. All is in order on the CDs. ‘Wichita Lineman’ makes a little countrified corner of my heart swoon as usual and ‘Creque Alley’ makes a little psychedelic corner of my mind yearn to be out of my bin on acid in ‘60s San Francisco. The cassettes are in fine fettle too. The Steve Winwood Roll With It album appears almost untouched. After one listen, I think I know why. Steve Winwood is pants. It’s music for jacket and jeans CEO types to drive down the California coastline in open-top cars while pondering if their recent divorce has unshackled their inner ‘soul’. There was a recent hair-brained attempt to rehabilitate Winwood’s music in a particularly far-fetched essay in The Wire magazine. Pure tosh. This is soulless music that is best plundered in order to provide two second samples for Italo-trance tracks. However, it was worth buying to validate the above rant. Paul Simon sounds fabulous. Maybe this man was built for cassette? Graceland’s natural home seems to be on magnetically charged audio tape. In the same way, Chevy Chase, Paul’s comedic partner in the video to ‘You can call me Al’ is most at home on VHS. Listening to my cheapskate copy of Graceland reminds me that the cassette is not an entirely useless medium. If your natural proclivities tend toward laziness, you are more or less forced to hear each side from start to finish. The familiar stuff out of the way, I delve into the rest of my charity haul. The oddities. The impulse buys. Stuff I wouldn’t normally think twice about.

Timmy Mallett’s single, unsurprisingly, is cobblers of the highest order, albeit with a strange B Side called ‘Mr Mallett, Mr Mallett’ that is a surprisingly explicit and cynical pastiche of pilled up early nineties ‘ardkore techno. It’s a bit druggy and not what I expected of the paragon of kiddies TV. Shame on you Mallett. A vinyl of John Williams space movie themes played live by the Boston Pops is a snip at two euro, as is a seminal ‘60s record by the New York psychedelic jazz outfit Blood Sweat and Tears. It’s called The Child is Father to the Man and its insane cover is a tableau of all the band members with tiny versions of themselves sitting on their laps like children. In today’s age of photoshop this record cover is still disturbing, and even if the music wasn’t good (which it is), it’s worth it for the cover alone. I also listen to a Shed Seven single, an album by a failed indie band called Cosmic Rough Riders, a superb compendium of Soviet folk music and a cassette of house remixes of early Pet Shop Boys tracks. All this for twenty quid.

So, if you are stuck for cash and still craving the root and reward dynamics of a good day shopping for records, you could do a lot worse than the charity shops. Drop your prejudices at the door, and who knows you could discover a whole new genre of music. It’s better than the internet. Why? Because, I know that a million monkeys with a million broadband connections would never, ever, come up with a copy of ‘The Bump’ by Timmy Mallett, but somehow I did.

Wolf Parade interview

Illustration by Scalder.

From the tangled guitar and synth intro of ‘Soldier’s Grin’ the entire attitude of Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer can be foretold. It plays like a decelerated ‘Fancy Claps’, the Canadian outfit’s most frantic moment on their zealously adored debut Apologies To The Queen Mary; The same playful melodies two-step with each other, but their pace is slower, their movement more intuitively complex, and they’ve stopped stepping on each other’s feet. The teenage disco phase of the Parade’s triumphant indie-rock has come to a close. No more desperate grabs in the dark, no more boundless energy. At Mount Zoomer is strictly ballroom.
In the three years since Apologies earned more swooning looks than Zooey Deschanel at an indie disco Wolf Parade (comprised of the two songwriters Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, ex-Hot Hot Heat guitarist Dante DeCaro, laptop-fiddler Hadji Bakara, and drummer Arlen Thompson) have been elevated to a dizzying plateau overlooking North American indie. Nobody ever claimed they were doing anything original, they were just doing something frighteningly addictive and widely accessible. However, thanks to the band’s 5,201 (approx.) side-projects, Wolf Parade LP2 was as tangible as the ghosts that populate their lyrics. Thanks to a brace of highly-lauded albums from Krug’s Sunset Rubdown and Boeckner’s Handsome Furs hype surrounding what would become At Mount Zoomer maintained its barometer-breaking levels. When the album finally dropped it could only polarize.
Three months after most ears heard the band’s sophomore release disparate opinions have begun to reconcile. What once seemed a contrived attempt to be “difficult” has become a reason to excavate to deeper strata, what was once deemed to be a too obvious division between the two chief songwriters has become an intricate counterbalance, and what was once 5 minutes too long has become 2 minutes too short. Settling into Mt. Zoomer is akin to closing your eyes and falling backwards into the arms of a long-forgotten friend.
We fell into the welcoming embrace of Arlen Thompson, drummer-come-engineer of Mt. Zoomer (and chief resident of Mt. Zoomer itself) as he talked to us about prog, hype and how being half-assed actually works.

Have you ever Googled your own name?

Oh there’s a word for that, I can’t remember what it is… I think I’ve done that like once and was very disappointed.

I just put your name into Google and the first result was “Arlen Thompson is a bear”.

Hahahah. Woah! What the fuck? What was the site?

I don’t know, I was kind of frightened to click onto it.

Haha, I would be too, man.

For all the blogger fanboy talk over whether Mt. Zoomer was going to be either “Dan or Spencer’s album”, do you think it’s turned out to actually be “Arlen’s album”? It’s recorded and produced and named after your studio, and the drums are a whole lot more present than on Apologies.

Ha! I dunno, I think that’d be a bit much. I think on this album we’re a lot more together, it’s more of a group effort. Being called Mt. Zoomer is funny… It started there with these improvisational sessions, and although we recorded it in different places, it felt like this era was attached to Mt. Zoomer and it was right to call it after it. Mt. Zoomer’s also a play on a good friend’s name. It’s got a lot of inside things like that going on.

What were you going for with the mix of it? It’s not as clean as Apologies, it’s unfussy.

For me when I was recording it I really wanted to capture what we did live and get it on to a recording. We did a lot of the tracking out at Arcade Fire’s studio just outside of Montreal, in this small-town in Quebec. It’s a massive room in this old church, and we just put microphones up all over the room. It’s all of us together at the same time, we’re not fussed over the details too much. Most record production today is all about the minor details, making everything perfect. We really just wanted to throw it up and let it fly, and that’s how the songs turned out. A lot of them are really raw, we’re using first and second takes.

I was talking to the Constantines last week, and they said that for them the live experience and gigging is their ultimate priority, and recorded material definitely second. You don’t really get to tour a whole lot thanks to the amount of other commitments the band members all have, so what’s the Wolf Parade spin on that?

I think live is really important for us, it’s how we work best. When we play together we have a really unique thing, we all know each other’s music ability fairly intimately so we can do things and go places musically that’s always really satisfying. So generally, the live show is the engine of the band. The studio thing when we recorded Apologies was really difficult, when you’re recording like that it really reduces things. It was difficult to find that energy, or that relationship that you have with the music, because you’re not attacking it as a whole.

So do you think Mt. Zoomer’s actually a better approximation of Wolf Parade as a band, is it a more concise statement than Apologies?

It’s definitely a statement of where we’re at now. As a band we’ve evolved so much since Apologies, I think thanks to everybody’s other projects. There’s been multiple records out since Apologies, so when it came to working on Mt. Zoomer it was a situation where we couldn’t write the same record again. There wasn’t much thought put into it, we just relaxed and did our thing and didn’t focus on trying to write singles, which is probably why it functions better as a whole.

That whole “no singles” policy has led to a lot of references to Mt. Zoomer as prog album. Do you think that’s a tag that fits Wolf Parade?

Yeah I think this album is pretty proggy. It all comes out of improvised jams, so we ended up with some deep song structures and long-winded songs. I think we could be accused of being pretty proggy…

Haha, so you’d take it as an accusation rather than a compliment?

Nah, I guess it’s a compliment. I’m not a huge fan. I’ve got maybe one Genesis record. To me prog means there’s a deeper structure there than conventional rock music. There are a lot of weird things going on on this record.

Do you find bizarre as band that does very little self-promotion that you’ve become one of the most hyped bands of the decade?

Yeah. We don’t even have a website or anything like that. We get covered a lot on blogs but we’ve never really attempted to get in that position. It’s weird to be in it, you really wonder if you’re actually going to live up to they hype. When you see bands first that are massively hyped you usually end up disappointed. Where there are that many words written about you, you’ve a lot to live up to.

You talked before about the band being pretty half-assed… Has the new album required more dedication than before?

Hahaha, no, we’re still pretty half-assed. Musically we take it really seriously. Everything outside of playing music together usually doesn’t get nearly as much attention as other bands. I think there’s a great half-assed quality to what we do.

Maybe “slacker” sounds better?

I guess it’s slacker! We’re stuck in the slacker mentality, we’ll say.

So have you all decided what to do as band next, or do you take it more day-by-day than that?

Yeah, it’s more day-to-day. Everyone’s got so much going on and Wolf Parade is just one part of that. Spencer, Dan and Dante are constantly putting stuff out. We’ll probably end up taking a break after this European tour, I don’t know when we’ll get back to making more music together. Hopefully it’ll be sooner than the three years it took us to get Mt. Zoomer out though.

Do you find that because you spend less time in each other’s pockets you get on a whole lot better when you do get together?

Yeah, we all realize there’s something wholly unique in what happens when we come together and play as musicians. It’s a different outlet for creativity with no definitive results for what’s going to happen. If anything having a lot of things going on musically allows us to come back to Wolf Parade in an even more satisfying way than normally.

The Polaris prize being announced this week made me think of something… Over here in Ireland we had this period of singer-songwriters being stupidly popular, suddenly any guy with an acoustic guitar and Nick Drake songs could sell out shows, but now if you say you’re a singer-songwriter you might as well have leprosy. I was wondering if there’s a same sort of situation in Canada where indie-rock bands are really stigmatized at the minute after the massive buzz of the last few years? A lot of the bands who were part of that hype have gotten cold receptions to their new albums.

I don’t think so actually. The thing with Canada, I don’t know if it’s the same in Ireland or not, but the mainstream music industry is really, really small. So a lot of the more indie bands aren’t really that present here, they spend a lot more time in Europe, like Black Mountain, Plants and Animals, or the Arcade Fire. They tend to look at things a whole lot more internationally. There hasn’t really been a backlash as such because there’s a lot of space here. I mean there are a lot of bands, especially in Toronto, Montreal is ridiculous, everybody’s in a band. Everybody’s comfortable doing their own thing. The thing with Polaris I really enjoy is that I know half the people on the shortlist, so I end up pretty happy whoever wins, I know that whoever’s getting $20,000 deserves it. We have our own kind of Grammy’s, the Juno’s, and I don’t know anybody who wants to be involved with that.

How would you feel if Wolf Parade won a Juno?

We’d have the share the stage with Nickelback or something. I think we’d rather not show up. I don’t think I could look at myself in the morning after that.

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