Wolf Parade at The Phoenix Concert Theater in Toronto, 4-7-10

My brother and I braved the QEW once again on Wednesday, this time to see the resurfacing Wolf Parade. As I said in an earlier post, I’ve never seen these guys before so I was extraordinarily excited. The band has two (incredible) albums worth of released material to pull from as well as a whole bunch of new stuff to debut. Despite being separated from one another for a bit (and working on other projects), the band’s chemistry was intact. I’m always a bit apprehensive about seeing bands whose core members are involved in other acts. Perhaps it’s an unfounded accusation, but I’m always worried that band relationships may suffer from external progression. In Wolf Parade’s case, both it’s singers have ventured out to form other bands and projects. Spencer Krug has recorded albums as both Sunset Runbdown and Moon Face, while Dan Boeckner co-leads Handsome Furs. Luckily, my hypothesis was proved false and Krug and Boeckner shared their vocal duties both flawlessly and with enthusiasm. Perhaps the most charming moment came when Krug called his mother whilst on stage and joined the audience in a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” dedicated to her. Since the band is releasing a new album, entitled Expo 86 this summer; we were treated to a lot of new material, for which the band (unnecessarily) apologized profusely. I’m not entirely sure of the names of the new songs, but they all sounded amazing. The crowd ate up every last bit of what the band put forth, new or old. The songs weren’t all new of course, the set-list was peppered with Wolf classics like I’ll believe in anything, This heart’s on fire, and the anthemic Kissing the beehive. The band even provided us with an entirely old song encore as a reward for our enthusiasm over their new stuff. As for the mechanics of the show, the band sounded damn near flawless. Wolf Parade’s multi-instrumental, multi-vocalist and, well, multi-everything approach could easily correlate to poor live sound. Fortunately, this is entirely not the case. During the show Krug quipped that someone had once charged the band with having songs that contained “too many notes”, and proceeded to dedicate one of their multi-everything tunes to said pessimist. Wolf Parade’s “kitchen-sink” approach to music making never feels too full or sprawling. Either the members of the band have a natural gift for connecting sound, instrument and voice or they are a bunch of really good editors. I would be willing to suppose the former. The new songs are no exception to Wolf Parade’s tradition, they did seemed a bit more on the Apologies to the Queen Mary spectrum to me, but we’ll have to wait for Expo’s release to be sure. You can check out one of the new songs in a fan-recorded video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHodchwsXEk

And some of my own pictures below (taken from my not-at-all professional Canon Power-shot, so be forgiving)