Hype doesn’t matter, music does
Wolf Parade missed the ‘soft revolution’ but still feels pressure to save rock
Jen Zoratti

“There’s Arcade Fire, The Dears, someone else. Hey, where’s Broken Social Scene from?”

Wolf Parade keyboardist/vocalist Spencer Krug is trying, comically, to figure out who’s considered to be a major player in the ever-publicized Montreal indie scene.

Perhaps his confusion stems from the fact that Wolf Parade originated in Victoria, or perhaps because it wasn’t really around for the soft revolution.

“We were out of town for almost two months at the time,” the soft-spoken Krug explains. “So it’s actually kind of hard for us to say how the whole thing affected us. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t know Arcade Fire got super famous. We were part of it —but we weren’t really in it.”

When Montreal found its underground music scene being uprooted and splashed across the pages of Spin and the New York Times, Wolf Parade found itself opening for The Arcade Fire, which was being hailed as one of the most important bands in music. WP had already been a cult hit for its razor-sharp live show, but the Arcade Fire tour was just what the quintet needed to promote the 2005 release of the shimmering debut album Apologies to the Queen Mary.

“When the album came out there was already a lot of hype,” Krug says, “but I think we just happened to be a band that was doing somewhat well at the right time.”

Wolf Parade’s quirky art rock certainly deserves its praise. Apologies to the Queen Mary weaves an ethereal soundscape similar to that crafted by The Arcade Fire, but it’s inflected with enough fuzzed-out guitars and ’70s-glam-rock swagger to keep the sound original.

And while Wolf Parade had a lucrative friendship with The Arcade Fire, it also had other friends in high places. The quintet, filled out by Dan Boeckner (vocals, guitar), Arlen Thompson (drums), Hadji Bakara (keyboards) and former Hot Hot Heat member Dante DeCaro (percussion, guitar), solicited the services of Modest Mouse’s Issac Brock, who recorded most of the album and offered the then-fledgling band an opportunity to play some shows with MM.

“All that stuff perpetuates that buzz. I mean, the exposure of a Modest Mouse show...” Krug trails off. “We had mixed feeling about it, playing venues that big with numbers that big.”

Wolf Parade, like a lot of Canadian indie bands, quickly found itself saddled with the burden of making the music that was supposed to save rock, and because ‘indie’ refers more to a type of music than label ties, that description brings an entire shift in scene.

“If you look at what’s going on with indie rock, it’s turning very mainstream,” Krug says. “It’s really not a super-accessible, community-minded scene. It tries to be, but it’s not.

“A lot of our roots are in punk, not so much in music, but in attitude. We’re not Fugazi or anything, but it’s still really weird when all of a sudden there’s 2,000 kids that can afford to see you. We played Coachella a while ago, and it was all about money and advertising.”

“It’s really fucked up and weird when you realize that you’re part of the machine,” Krug says and then laughs nervously. “Holy fuck. I have no idea how I ended up on that tangent.”