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.