Wolf Parade
Wiltern Theatre - July 31, 2010
On Saturday, July 31, 2010, Wolf Parade played a packed house at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre and gave us a true and deep and powerful 16-song set that felt like a kickoff show, not the end of a month long North American tour. A WP show is an intense, energy-sucking and energy-breeding experience. We give and they give and it is symbiosis. The Montreal quartet brings such a fervent intensity to their studio recordings, one might not expect the in-person version to be quite as impassioned. And one would be more than slightly off the mark. There is not even minimal deviation in the live performance from the marathon level of athleticism you get on Apologies to the Queen Mary and their newest release, Expo 86. This is no small feat taking into consideration their extensive touring and the speed and power of their program. The two-hour set was packed with force from lights up to curtain call.
The gorgeous theatre filled fast with gorgeous people who were in more jovial of moods than I have seen at one of these hipster outings. People were hugging and people were dancing and people were helping strangers get to their seats and passing drinks and sharing like they were taught to years ago. Boys in black framed glasses and supershort haircuts held their cotton flower dress wearing gals and boys loving boys danced with their eyes closed and raised up their hands and people alone fell in place with the hearty haling of two of current music’s best vocalists, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug (we’ll just go with the neighborly “Dan and Spencer”).
The way these two tag-team a set and they way they feed off each other is something of an unconventional animal. Plenty of bands double up their vocals but with Dan and Spencer, you really get two distinct singers and each song yields to their nuances. Dan sings with an about-to-come-unglued urgency and Spencer’s warble and wail speak more to our basest urges. You look to Dan and he sings like the pain is still so raw and then you look to Spencer and he hovers over the keys like a rabid dog, hungry and howling.
My theory about WP is a simple one. Dan and Spencer feel it and sing it and bring it and play it and you can’t comprehend that they’ve done this for you and you want to hug strangers and you want to howl at the moon to say, “I’m not alone.” WP does this and people cherish the sympathy and people make out and dance to the rhythm of the music, but the music is in the pulse of this animal procession. Why WP is a success is as much about their resonance as it is about their dissonance (and I mean that in the psychological, not musical way). What WP does live is not just sing and play for you, they play into you. And they say, “Thank you,” and they say, “You’re too kind,” and keep pouring it all out there, the slippery shiny wax of their candor. Lyrics like, “I wish I could believe in who you are You held your cock in the air and you called it a guitar You put your face on the glass and you called it good cinema, oh As if you didn't know that it would sting” on “Kissing the Beehive” cut so sharp and so deep because they’re real. The only other band on this writer’s register that can make so beautiful the banal is The National. For my money, that’s a good band with whom to take allegiance.
Wolf Parade closed out their North American tour in tandem and serenaded us into Sunday with their honesty and their intensity and the midnight crowd dispersed arms in arms, elated. |
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