Wolf Parade:
Expo 86

Paste Rating

8.3

commendable

User Rating

(3 votes)

8.3

Your Rating

0.0

Marching on

Wolf Parade’s third studio LP attempts to straddle the ghostly and mesmerizing pop of their stellar debut Apologies to the Queen Mary and the sprawling, fuzzed-out prog of followup At Mount Zoomer. The Montreal quartet is mostly successful in this balancing act, delivering a handful of thematically-obtuse pop missiles heavy on reverb and guitar, with trademark synths still lurking low in the mix. There’s plenty of Queen Mary-esque verve and vigor; “Palm Road” is a delightfully skuzzy guitar-rocker buoyed by straight-outta-DEVO Casio lines, and “Pobody’s Nerfect” is Wolf Parade in fighting trim—a cacophony of gritty guitar, Moog, rumbling drums and crashing cymbals. Occasionally things get a little too wacky (“I had a vision of a gorilla / And he was a killer, a killer!” co-frontman Spencer Krug yelps on rollicking closer “Cave-O-Sapien”) but you can hardly fault the band. Their weirdness is eminently infectious and, as always, theirs’ alone.