WOLF PARADE – EXPO 86

Review by Gil Israel

            
            This week, I will once again be reviewing an indie album that’s not old and not too new. In fact, one may think it a little strange that I only just listened to it and am just reviewing this album now given that it came out in 2010, but hey, it was next up on my list of music to enjoy. So without further ado, I shall commence my review of Canadian Indie-rock band Wolf Parade’s third and final album, Expo 86.

            Without a doubt, Expo 86 is a great album with nearly every track being a tasty indie-rock jam. You’ll find some great fuzzy riffs, especially in the third song “What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way), some awesome synth-work (see “In the Direction of the Moon”), and engaging/dynamic arrangements throughout. The lyrics are solid as well with lead vocalist Spencer Krug dropping lines like “So raise your hands, as he’s explaining how he built this city on cocaine lasers” in “Pobody’s Nerfect,” and my personal favorite, “I was a dream-catcher hanging in the window of a minivan parked by a water’s edge” in album opener “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain (I mean come on! Now that is an image!).

The best track of the album though, is fourth track “Little Golden Age.” On this track, the band not only shows their ability to craft beautiful evocative melodies, but also showcase their ability to build and manipulate sounds by creating a heavy shoegaze atmosphere that dominates, but doesn’t smother (perhaps the mixer deserves credit here as well…). There is a great interplay between the walls of fuzzed-out guitars and synthesizers, and Krug’s voice fits perfectly, producing an emotional bliss in the listener that only very few tracks succeed in doing. Even the lyrics are good, as they produce novel images in a song with the relatively cliché subject matter of singing of a better time passed: “You left town feeling pretty down, with your headphones and your coat, and your dirty graduation gown.”

BUT, even though this album is full of incredibly solid rock songs, that’s all the album really is… a collection of solid rock songs. Throughout the album I couldn’t help but wish that Wolf Parade would take their songs in weirder directions. I kept hoping that as the songs progressed they would add some crazy psychedelic synth noises, would do some feedback fueled breakdowns, or would do something more off the beaten path. Compared to “I’ll Believe in Anything,” one of their most successful songs off their debut album, with it’s quirky syncopations, crazy synth noises, and disorienting triple over duple time signature (or something like that), the tracks on this album feel like standard classic rock tunes.

In fact, the song “Palm Road” sounds like a standard Bruce Springsteen song, and some of the other songs come so close to the more commercial rock that you could almost see Wolf Parade being lumped into that same group as The Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters (no disrespect if you like those bands, I like them too). The album barely has enough unique aspects to it to differentiate it, and as a result, it comes dangerously close to being just another mainstream rock record… It even seems like the band realized this, and tried to differentiate the album more by subverting typical track names like Nobody’s Perfect to the album’s “Pobody’s Nerfect,” or Julia to “Yulia.”

Yet, that being said, a band can never go wrong if they write good songs, and this album certainly has good songs in spades. Though the songs can often feel a little cliché, or not quite different enough, there are enough moments to excite you and even a nice track-to-track transition between “Oh You, Old Thing” and “Yulia.” Thus, Wolf Parade’s Expo 86 is certainly an album worth checking out. Though you may not walk away feeling like you’ve experienced anything particularly new, you’ll at least walk away satisfied with some truly great rock songs.

OVERALL SCORE

8.0