Band of the Week: We are Wolves

Hometown: Montreal, Quebec
Members [L-R]: Antonin Marquis (drums), Vincent Levesque (keyboards), Alexander Ortiz (vocals, guitars)
Why they’re worth checking out: More than just another lupine-monikered rock band, this French Canadian trio is intent on bringing its bass-and-synth-heavy dance party to your town.
For fans of: Liars, Suicide, The Rapture

Struggling to hear the two polite young men as they speak softly with slight accents across a sub-par phone connection, I conclude We are Wolves is a band that doesn't make music for money or fame or any of the other silly trappings of the music business. These guys—much like the girls in Cyndi Lauper’s most well-known song—just want to have fun.

"I'm curious as to what point this project can be investigated," keyboardist Vincent Levesque says, his handset the less crackly of the two. "It started as a hobby, and we never thought about playing a show. It just kind of happened, and I get pretty excited about it."

"That's the main thing about our band," vocalist/guitarist Alexander Ortiz adds, static nearly drowning him out at moments. "If people want to listen to [our music] and have fun with us, that's the most important. We don't want to change the face of music."

Reading these quotes, it's obvious my conclusion isn't exactly revelatory. The band’s debut, Non-Stop Je Te Plie En Deux, is a blast to listen to. And from the "My Sharona" bassline of "Little Birds" to the noise-shrouded shout-along vocals on, well, just about any song on the record, you'd be hard pressed to claim these Quebecoise take themselves too seriously. They’re not even sure where they fit into the musical landscape.

"Musically speaking, we reference a lot, but we always think we are associated with bands that we're not," Levesque says. "Metal dudes come up to us and say, 'I can head bang to your music,' and we're like, 'What?' There are weird associations that we've never thought of that are happening."

Non-Stop was first self-released by the band exclusively in Canada with a limited run of 1,000 copies. Ortiz says these are "pretty much gone," which resulted in a second pressing. Before long, Fat Possum—an independent label known mostly for its blues recordings—picked up the band. "It's really, really weird," Ortiz says. "Someone had received the CD from I don't know where, then Matthew [Johnson, label president] at Fat Possum called us and seemed like he liked it. Something that's really specific to Fat Possum is that really dirty sound. [And we’re] really raw. I think that's what he liked in our music. He didn't sign us for the beats."

The record's title, which translates loosely to "I fold you in half non-stop," is actually more than just nonsense. Its significance is derived from, of all things, professional wrestling. "It doesn't have a real precise meaning," Levesque says. "It can be interpreted as either a wrestling thing or a sexual thing."

"And a dancing thing, also, in a certain way," Ortiz adds. "I perceive it as a really intense moving of the body. It's either wrestling, sexual or dancing to a tribal beat. Like voodoo. You're convulsing to the energy of whatever's going on."

Pushed to clarify a bit, the frontman uses an anecdote from his youth.

"The wrestling is kind of hard to visualize," Ortiz says. "When I was young, the guy who wanted to impress the other guy [in a wrestling match] would say, 'I'm just going to fold you in half.' You know, like a metal bar."

With plans to release another album on Fat Possum, the band also hopes to record a single which will be a part of a new EP sometime in the near future.

Regardless of how the band's sound evolves, it looks like We are Wolves plans on clinging to its fun-loving approach. The attitude is there, even in the childlike glee that oozes out when Ortiz speaks about something as simple as record shopping.

"I know we don't sound at all like Stooges or the Velvet Underground, but those are bands that I've been listening to my whole life," he says. "Today, every time I buy new records from new bands, I start listening to them, but then I go back to The Stooges and the Velvets because they're so f—ing amazing."