The day before the band took off on a short American tour that will lead up to their two sold-out Montreal shows, Wolf Parade guitarist/singer Dan Boeckner and I sat down over coffee. While he's not losing sleep over it, I could tell that the backlash pisses him off.
"When we were just starting out I was posting on montrealshows.com, and it totally reminded me of being a hardcore kid," he says. "You know, you read these show reviews and about demo tapes from bands you'd never heard of, then you'd order them and it was really exciting. And it was instant, so there was an ongoing
"I remember someone dissed one of our shows, and it was kind of like 'those guys are retarded' or 'they suck,' and I wrote this long post that said 'this is my name, this is my telephone number.' It's really easy to sit on the Internet and dispense criticism from behind an assumed name. Of course no one ever came up and said anything to me, so I just kind of gave up."
While there is something cruel that this disconnect allows - people seem to forget these are real people's livelihoods that they're dismissing - Boeckner does still have a sense of humour about it.
"You wonder whether these people like music or just the act of liking music. It's like, 'I go to school, I'm into music, and I'm into things you couldn't even comprehend' - some guy beating a rock in his basement and feeding it through a delay pedal in fucking Providence, Rhode Island, or whatever, and 'Oh, what, you haven't heard of that?'"
Press is evil, blah, blah, blah
As always, the press played a role. Whether it was lazy, reductive journalism or simply catering to an audience that needs to be able to put things in nice, neatly definable boxes, almost every story was identical.
"Right before the album came out, the interviews we were doing were all obviously completely prewritten in the journalist's head: question about Arcade Fire, question about Montreal music scene, question about [Modest Mouse's] Isaac Brock, miscellaneous funny quote, go see them at 'x' venue. It was funny because we'd be doing these interviews and then we'd show up in the city the next day and look at the daily or the weekly paper, and they were all pretty much interchangeable."
One of the things that resonated with me about Wolf Parade was that, while they were making music in the frequently dilettante-leaning, middle-class ennui world of indie rock, they seemed absolutely working class. You could feel the desperation and elation of real life in every song. The group, which has been bolstered by ex-Hot Hot Heat guitarist Dante DeCaro, work as the melding of disparate elements: the push and pull between Boeckner's guitar and Spencer Krug's keyboards, the interplay of their two voices, and the pulse of Hadji Bakara's electronics over the backbone of Arlen Thompson's percussion. And, while all of the members hail from the West Coast, Wolf Parade is Montreal through and through.
"For all intents and purposes, we are a Montreal band - we formed in Montreal, and I think the stuff that we wrote about on the first album was influenced by living here, you know? Not in terms of other bands, more in terms of the weather, the landscape, the people you know, what you do." And what many people in this city do, like Boeckner, is work a shitty job to support the things that really interest them. "I mean, there's no real telemarketing industry in Vancouver, and some of the stuff that I wrote was definitely influenced by spending two years telemarketing. I wanted to put a bullet in my head by the end of it."
Judge not, lest ye be judged
While most of the band no longer works a day job (though Bakara is still finishing his master's), things are just differently difficult. The last year has seen the band touring at a pace that Boeckner calls "brutal," on the road so much that he's noticed what he calls the "second wave" of fans.
"Your fan base kind of shifts when the first album comes out," Boeckner posits. "There's a definite arc. The crowd's really changed, really expanded since we started. I mean, the last show that we played for, I don't know what to call them - Mile End hipsters? - was at Main Hall and it was great."
But perhaps it was the retreat of the hipsters, or simply that their audience is growing, that the majority of the shows they play now are entirely different.
"Our audience is all-white college kids in the States. When we go down and play the States, we play the 'Ivy League belt.' Which is fine - they're totally enthusiastic, it just gives me the willies a bit."
Here, Boeckner and I hit on a common thread that we've both noticed creeping into the music listening world: that there are somehow "better, cooler" fans out there, whose opinion counts for more, and who'd prefer it that they remain the group's only followers. "I find with some bands and some underground shit, people can be really crabby about crowds and totally snobby," observes Boeckner. "Like, 'I don't want to play for these people because they're wearing ball hats or whatever.' I would way rather have a kid, who's just a regular-ass kid, freaking out at the front of the stage because they like the music, than somebody quietly judging me at the back [of the crowd]."
Looking forward, Boeckner speaks about the group's plans to establish something that will withstand the fickle winds of fandom. On top of returning to Montreal this summer to record their next album, both he, Krug and DeCaro have solo projects they're working on (Handsome Furs, Sunset Rubdown and Dante DeCaro, respectively). The group is also building a new Mile End studio with Rob Squire, a.k.a. Sixtoo, to serve as a recording space for both their own music and others'.
So perhaps Wolf Parade could be considered in the same breath as Arcade Fire, in that their music is shaped by the experience of living in Montreal, they retain roots in the city's music community, and, most importantly though frequently overlooked, they are a great band that writes great songs.
Wolf ParadeWith Holy Fuck and The Besnard Lakes at The National (1220 Ste-Catherine E.), April 19With Sixtoo at The National, April 20
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