FROM CUBS TO WOLVES Canadian indie-rock stalwarts WOLF PARADE have released third full-length Expo 86, their fastest-created project to date – and first without synth player Hadji Bakara. Drummer ARLEN THOMPSON explains to MITCH KNOX this big news is simply all the better to rock you with.
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hat if there was a single moment in your life that linked your friends together which, somehow, profoundly impacted every one of you in such a way that, years later, you would find yourselves in a place which you could only have reached as a result of having experienced that moment? It sounds pretty wanky in theory, but it arguably happened for Morrissey and the other famous attendees at the Sex Pistols’ legendary June 1976 gig, so why couldn’t it happen for five young friends at the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, aka Expo 86, one of British Columbia’s most historic events? It makes for an interesting thought, and it’s what Canada’s Wolf Parade used as the basis for the idea behind their recently-released third album Expo 86. There is an accompanying story to the album which involves the young band members making a pact at the event to form an awesome rock act later on but, of course, this is more mythology than fact. Not even knowing each other at the time was always going to make that kind of fortuitous predetermination a little difficult to pull off. “A lot of what we do is kind of inside jokes, and so this was a bit like that,” band skinsman and super nice-sounding guy Arlen Thompson explains. “It was part of this… almost like a thought experiment that someone came up with on the road at some point. Just growing up in British Columbia, like we all did, Expo 86 was a really big thing, so we had this thought experiment that we had met all our friends at Expo 86 without even knowing it, because everyone we knew had gone there. That was something that might’ve – you know, being at an event like that might have somehow profoundly changed our young minds.
conscious of what they’re doing and has to struggle a little bit. There’s a little edge, a little life. “That was kind of one of the processes of this record. We wanted the recording process to accompany that, so we kept it really simple. We recorded a lot of everything live off the floor and tried to keep the overdubs really minimal, and tried to keep the direction really minimal. One of the ideas we had was that everything basically we did on the record we wanted to be able to do it live, so if there was an overdub or something it was something you would have to be able to play, or it wouldn’t go on the record. There were a few little exceptions here and there on the record, but that was kind of what we were going for.”
WHO: Wolf Parade WHAT: Expo 86 (Sub Pop/Stomp)
“I think like everybody I know who grew up in British Columbia around that time had been to Expo 86. It was really one of those things that everyone went to. We had all been there; I don’t think all at the same time, but yeah, we just kind of ran with that idea, and that ended up being a bit of the theme for the album.”
I don’t think there was too much thought really involved... it was just whatever sounded good, we kept... Of course, one of the key problems with the “five young Wolf Paraders meeting each other at Expo 86 and promising to form a band” is that by the time this album was created, founding member and synth-player Hadji Bakara had already departed to arguably less green pastures in the form of postgraduate studies, leaving a hole in the family – and the inevitable question of how to fill it. “Well, we kind of knew it because he left the band midway through one of our tours,” Thompson says. “So we kind of knew that he was going to be going on to do other things. So yeah, it’s just one of those things, you know? We just have to keep on. “I think we’ve kind of just moved on as a band. He’s got obligations now that are going to last him a couple of years.” Synthesizers, as fans – and detractors – of the instrument well know, are a very difficult element to get right. They can so easily be unobtrusive and value-adding in a song, and just as easily be played with a heavy or unguided hand and undergo a Jekyll-Hyde style transformation to obnoxious and unwelcome spotlighthogger. When the decision was made, instead of introducing a new synth player, to delegate the duties to guitarists Dan Boeckner and Hot Hot Heat alumnus Dante DeCaro, they used their existing knowledge and understanding of how their former bandmate operated in order to keep things consistent across players. “I think, basically, we knew he adds a lot of texture to what we do, so I think the idea was really for Dan and Dante – Dan’s picking up keyboards to kind of add in a little bit of melodic texture – and that’s what ended up being on the album. We ended up splitting Hadji’s duties between Dan and Dante more or less,” he says. “There’s definitely going to be different players and different… you know, like Hadji had his thing, and a really great ear for designing synth patches and things like that, and was really conscious of what he was doing. But Dan and Dante were really pretty new to it; I think they basically just picked it up at the start of this record. So yeah, I think a lot of it is just the way you work together as a band; there’s a consciousness going across the band about what we want to do. I don’t think there was too much thought really involved; I think it was just whatever sounded good, we kept, and whatever we didn’t like, we left behind.” The band didn’t waste time leaving stuff behind, either. Where their previous albums took a comparatively long time to record and release, Wolf Parade were adamant that Expo 86 be as smooth and quick a process as possible. The end result is an album that possesses the mature production of sophomore At Mount Zoomer (2008) sweetly intertwined with the debut fire and rawness of 2005’s Apologies To The Queen Mary. “It just kind of fell out,” Thompson bluntly offers. “Generally the way it goes we just kind of roll with it; usually the songs, when they get brought in, Dan or Spencer [Krug] have some riffs – Spencer usually has his songs a bit more defined – but when we start getting into it, we just see how it all falls together. “For us, we really wanted to keep the songs as fresh as possible. We really were conscious of trying to write the songs, and rehearse the songs and work on the arrangements – to get them to a certain point – because I always find when you’re working on songs, they always have a really nice kind of mid-period where they’re like a fresh bun out of the oven or something. And if you take too long, then they start... yeah, you play them too much, and you get too good at playing them, and it kind of loses a bit of life. So we really tried to capture all the songs right when they were freshest and right when they were kind of… where we weren’t playing them super-well so you didn’t have to think about it, so everybody keeps
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