27.6.08

two men scale a hill

Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

There's really no mountain here, not even a hill. I think if you had to spatially imagine this band it would be more horizontal, more like an ocean I think. Nevermind.

To begin: At Mount Zoomer is cleaved. Whereas, for me at least, it was difficult to tell if it were Boeckner or Krug singing on Apologies to the Queen Mary, each and every song on this album clocks on with full vocalist (and lyricist) details from the outset. And there's this annoying habit of having them one after the other, in this kind of two-man baton pass but I'm not really sure what the baton is or where they're going. Anyway, I think it's clearly an (unintended?) effect of their growing solo careers in Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown particularly, who have both released in the interim. They're staking out a territory and putting up flags - sure, fighting over the same general chunk of land, but it's like a Starcraft map with a river separating the two of them. Whereas something like Beast Moans (paging Krug) approached music creation as an antagonistic process of coming together, At Mount Zoomer seems to propose that gaps are inevitable, well, that they at least grow from somewhere and then it's like tectonic plates at the surface, when the road cracks and splits and gapes. I hope I find a bridge.

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