At Mount Zoomer
Label: Sub Pop
Length: LP
Rated: NONE
Media: CD
Format: Album
WorkNameSort: At Mount Zoomer

When Canadian indie pop band Wolf Parade handed in their completed album to Sub Pop Records a few months ago, it wasn’t without a caveat: “There are no singles,” they warned. The band delivered a solid 46-minute block of jams rather than five-minute chunks of lone, coerced moments.

“We never approached the record – when we were writing and arranging – as, ‘OK, this is gonna be the single,’ you know? We didn’t really think of it in that context,” says Wolf Parade drummer and At Mount Zoomer producer Arlen Thompson. “There is not really any one song that we feel defines the record or anything like that. Every song kind of has its own life, so to speak.”

On the backs of three self-titled EPs, they went into recording 2005’s debut LP, Apologies to the Queen Mary, as a well-oiled unit. But after years spent touring on the album, the glint and polish faded. With three tough years of experience under their belts, the sound and structure on Zoomer took on a different tone. At times cut from Manchester new wave cloth, the outing is still prog enough to make David Gilmour giggle. It’s a mixture that keeps the album moving without letting their jammy nature – as evidenced on the 11-minute “Kissing the Beehive” – spoil the mood.

“We wanted to make the best record we could, in the sense that we wanted to make something that was really honest to what we’d been doing,” says Thompson. “We just wanted to make really good music. I don’t think we were focusing on this album being really successful, or trying to do a follow-up to Apologies or anything.”

While At Mount Zoomer has its charms, it’s a more angular, jagged effort that doesn’t hit the ’90s-style jangle that made Apologies stand out. It’s filled with sharp notes, deriving its melody from Hadji Bakara’s synthesizers and Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug’s alternating vocal turns. In that capacity, Krug is indie rock’s Tom Petty, the frontman with the oddball, so-bad-it’s-good voice. But his instinct for discovering the buried hook within the maze of his songwriting jungle isn’t as sharp on Zoomer. He may be stretched too thin between his Wolf Parade duties and Sunset Rubdown, his other, more prolific band. In fact, Thompson is the only member without a side project.

“Everyone has a lot of different things going on, so that all kind of contributed to everyone’s growing and refining what we wanted to do musically,” says Thompson.

Side bands or no, Wolf Parade is the main attraction, and it’s the project that needs the most attention – more than it got on this record.

This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2008.