Brooklyn's Conveyor was the most verifiable real thing that took the stage at Glasslands this Wednesday evening. Surrounded by cloth flowers of the same vintage as the venue's famous fabric cloud backdrop, the band was further shrouded by a different non-textile obfuscation. The cloud machine below the stage, the one that trades CO2 for fake fog - and not in a metaphorical Cuckoo's Nest sense, this is real fake fog - began belching out its sorry product. It covered Conveyor in a second fake cloud, one around and one behind, fake flowers to stage left and stage right, making the band easily the most intentional object on stage. They had also asked Bill Murray to be their merch guy, a joke that sort of wasn't a joke. This was appropriate for a homecoming show, a very real return for a band who has been out on the road behind their very good, self-titled debut record.
The show was something of a high-wire act: two, three, four and sometimes, five part harmonies hung above sparse and occasionally explosive arrangements. Sounding a bit like Grizzly Bear playing Wolf Parade cuts, and this isn't even entirely fair because Grizzly Bear is about to rapidly redefine their legacy and the better parallel is ARMS, Conveyor opened with "Short Hair," a song about girls with angular hair cuts and bad attitudes. Playing mostly songs from their debut record, the band loaded the back half of the set with, "Mom Talk," "Mukraker," and "Right Sleep" in quick succession, each showcasing a penchant for delicate arrangements and erupting interludes. It was the central lyric of "Mom Talk," the explanatory, "I was away," that soared out over an expectant crowd. It was, after all, a show all about returns.
Could you love a machine? What if you already do? Blonde Summer's "Robots on Command" is substantially more bizarre than debut single, "Slow Days Fast Company." The latter was a slamming summer single, the former and more recent, "Robots" is a sort-of love letter to androids wrapped in a pulsing Wolf Parade-style arrangement. The existential questions are largely left out, the sort of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? investigations that lead, seemingly, inexorably to movies like The Terminator and The Matrix. What happens when they wake up? Will they love us or hate us? The bridge features a nearly fecund, purring lyric, "Don't go home to where you're from/space can wait," which is about as close as you can come to making a pass at a machine in modern pop music. This unity of man and machine is marked by the metaphor, "volcanoes and water coming together," a destructive love story for people who can't remember the last time their iPhone wasn't within an arm's reach. It seems like love or some kind of digital serfdom. Or maybe, it's the soundtrack for the moment you ask for directions and your phone says, "Why?"
It's no long list of great songs about death in space. David Bowie's"Space Oddity" and the Long Winters' "The Commander Thinks Aloud" both address this area with deft; Bowie spitting a magically real heartbreak about the relationship between Major Tom and Ground Control; John Roderick of the Long Winters documenting in the assumed first-person the last moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia, ending with the repeated and echoing lyric, "The crew compartment's breaking up." Wolf Parade's "Yulia" off their tweaking and perfect 2010 record Expo 86 addresses an apocryphal Soviet legend of cosmonauts hurriedly sent to beat Apollo 11 to the moon, their capsule shot a few degrees off course, sentenced to miss the lunar body and spin endlessly into space. It certainly adds some weight to Dan Boeckner's final lyrics, "There's nothing out here, nothing out here." On this re-imagining, Dan Griffin parses "Yulia" down to its sparest iteration, vocals and acoustic guitar later backed with a cello in the final chilling movements. It is as beautiful as it is tragic. Like Bowie and Roderick's space disasters, this is destined for fatalism, bits of aluminum spinning in infinity.
The heirs to the Wolf Parade throne, PS I Love You prepare to release sophomore LP, Death Dreams with the rip-roaring "Sentimental Dishes". Wailing guitars set themselves against tweaking vocals, all colliding in one of the most fun, chant-along choruses of the year. The coda is a gigantic 80s hair-metal progression that PS I Love You have dragged, heels dug into the ground, out to the garage where they've fuzzed it up and turned it loose. The result is a scary good chorus and a breathless rock song, something to scream along with whether you thinking screaming is useful or not.
What if you got lost and never came home? Wolf Parade side-project Handsome Furs, the brain child of Dan Boeckner, reflects on this question, eventually arriving at a new set of conclusions. Home has nothing to do with residence or passports or jingoism, it is a concept of the heart, and for Boeckner this center has moved to where the blaring pop music comes out of Chinese bodegas (you can't make this up; it is in their press release) and the places where hi-fi spins out of cranked, tinny speakers, calling revolution. The icy synths recall his Wolf Parade work but the back beat represents something playful and insistent. This matches Boeckner's intense final declaration, "I'll never be repatriated." He isn't coming home, this much is obvious. He belongs to something else.
Wolf Parade released perhaps their last and perhaps their best record, 2010's Expo 86. Lovers of the Apologies-era Wolf Parade found something in this smoother, darker version of the band. On "Ghost Pressure," haunting, frozen synths dance around the ceiling like spectres before a playful, upstroke chorus implies that this paranormal activity might not be all bad, "Little vision come shake me up, shake me up." Dan Boeckner spends the song's final two minutes in a direct conversation with these chilly keyboards, barking about swarms of bees and this imminently altering vision.
Uber-pretentious Brooklyn duo, Tanlines forecast a world in which we are perpetually promising to begin anew. It seemed that this urban-tribal pop was all the rage in 2010 and no one did it better than the two-some with the bad habit of saying about New York, "Um, yeah, we're from here." Despite their weak stage banter, the band proved a winner with "Real Life," and its concurrent assurance, "It was a passed life thing, it was a passed life thing." For New York kids with a ton to work on, it wasn't a flawed promise. For a song with nothing but sweetness in its borders, it wasn't anything at all.
28. Various Cruelties - "If It Wasn't For You"
A slice of throwback pop and a conditional message about love, Various Cruelties delivered one of the catchiest singles of the year with "If It Wasn't For You." The backing swells with some well-intentioned keys playing the role of strings. We can't promise this band will explode in 2011, but with a one-off this good, it would be an absolute shame if they didn't.
In the 2008 version of this list, we listed Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition" in the 20s. There was no clear sense that the song was not only the song of that year, but, in all probability, one of the best rock songs of the last ten years. On Mr. Little Jeans' "Rescue Song," we can't be certain of a similar explosion of this one song, but what is certainly true is that this girl is a comer, destined to invade your 2011 in a bizarre combination of Lykke Li and Feist. Put simply, if you're not ready, be ready.
26. Oberhofer - "I Could Go"
If repetition is the soul of pop music - and those songs we take most seriously to heart, those we hear most serially - then Brad Oberhofer is the dealer of this new brand. On "I Could Go," one of the most unbelievably catchy songs of 2010, Oberhofer utters twinkling keys behind a motivated rock arrangement that finally explodes into a million little pieces. It was the most explosive, true indie rock of the year and for that there are no apologies or explanations.
The mixture of Andy Hull and Kevin Devine didn't result in a fantastic record, but it generated a stunning and erupting single from Bad Books. The initial acoustic underpinnings hide all of the final thrashing aesthetic of the chorus and its singular message about things being either so good or so bad that you, well, shouldn't have to ask. An attention span under two minutes doesn't stop "You Wouldn't Have To Ask" from being one of the best rock songs of 2010.
24. The New Pornographers - "We End Up Together"
In all probability the New Pornographers made 2010's best song to characterize a fracturing and faithful American landscape. We are both certain that we are screwed, and for the damage that will necessarily ensue, and yet we are unavoidably in favor of our own co-dependence. Yes, we are for damage, sweet damage, and yet, in the midst of what might be our favorite but not best song of the year, we will all be in the same boat as we fly over the top of the falls.
It was club music for the kids partying at the bottom of the local swimming pool. Twin Sister was cold medicine techno for kids with down-stroke sensibility and affection for a laissez-faire female vocalist only matched by Victoria Legrand. The bass line was out to lunch and the guitars were only built to shuffle feet. The sea sick vocals and Dramamine synths were what made this unique, one of the few songs to encourage and demand our attention from a New York band with nothing but future in front of them.
Opening with the persistent rain that colors none of the rest of "Mighty," Lord Huron, LA's answer the Vampire Weekend problem so aptly posed by the band of the same name in 2007, offered nothing but sunshine on their most stunning single of 2010. "Mighty" was to indie rock what the Lion King was to the world of animated movies in the mid-1990s. Certainly it was full to brim, and unapologetically so, but it was the pop swell of the chorus that stuck well beyond the pop of the moment.
21. Stornoway - "I Saw You Blink"
Stornoway produced not only one of the great folk records of 2010, but two of the great singles, "Zorbing" and "I Saw You Blink." After weeks of internal debate and much fuss, we decided that "I Saw You Blink" was the superior of the two, leaving "Zorbing" out in the cold with its artistic integrity and pop-hooks as its only sustenance. Well, we have no such grandiose vision. "I Saw You Blink" is one of the best singles of the year. Beyond that - Lucy, whoever you are - we refuse to provide answers to the band's central question. We assume "the one," is in all of us and out there somewhere for everyone.
On the day after we walked Wolf Parade out to a soft patch of the backyard and buried her (this is what bands call an "indefinite hiatus"), PS I Love You's fuzz-heavy, guitar-charging, yelp-fest "Facelove" feels appropriate. As always with things of this nature, nothing will exactly replace her, even if the new iteration looks or sounds like the last one, but that doesn't mean PS I Love You are bad, owing what they do to their now deceased predecessor. Think of them as carriers of a worthwhile torch, rather than zombies walking through Ontario wearing Spencer Krug's jacket.
Even as the undercard to LCD Soundsystem, Wolf Parade still managed to level Chicago during Pitchfork; actually, the Sub Pop kids might have been better. Playing head-first into a blazing and rapidly setting sun, Wolf Parade ripped through half their new record and some old favorites noting, "We're not going to say much. We'll just try to play as many songs as we can in the hour they gave us." They did, closing with a furious, thrashing 10-minute, 90-degree-heat jam.
Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner are back to front a third Wolf Parade record, Expo 86. Not only does the album have some of the best cover art of the year, it promises to be the record that delivers on the masterwork of the band's debut and the fervor of their second effort. "Ghost Pressure" features haunting synths and a raucous arrangement to go with a sing-along chorus to rival anything on Apologies to the Queen Mary. It's not perfect but Wolf Parade always meant to unsettle, pitching exactly this brand of uneasy, tweaking pop. In the lush vintage of the album's sonics, even in its aggressive melody, Krug searches for pathos in the past and Boeckner joins him on the road. It is a journey back for a band who has done everything to walk away from who they were.
The new Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer is spreading through the Internet like mononucleosis at an sexually-active college or university. That is to say, it's a little lethargic but it's definitely going to get you if you stick in the right circles. Now, the communicability of mono is not on trial here but the catchiness of this record is. Some things to remember: 1) Wolf Parade released one of the best albums of 2005 with Apologies to the Queen Mary. And that record, fortunately or unfortunately, was produced by Issac Brock of Modest Mouse. It seemed like natural relationship, a heavy-hitter from the indie rock world mentoring an up-and-coming band. 2) Wolf Parade would like you to know that this record, At Mount Zoomer had NOTHING to do with Issac Brock. People have different theories how this whole thing fell apart but suffice it to say, Wolf Parade is no longer using Mr. Float On as their producer/mentor/father-figure.
All this taken into consideration, At Mount Zoomer isn't bad. In places, the record seems to claim autonomy for autonomy's sake. The first cut "Call It A Ritual" sounds like what would happen if you turned The Walkmen loose on a White Rabbits song. Wait. I hate the White Rabbits. It sounds like what would happen if Wolf Parade doubled the BPMs on a Walkmen song and acted like they cared. The second song leaking out of the album is arguably (and by this I mean, definitely) the better of the two. "Language City" starts a little slow but it finds itself at the 2.54 mark and takes off into a sing-along, chanting finish. Put yourself in the front-row as this song rockets itself down the stretch. It might be a little whiskey and water but as Wolf Parade kills the last 45-seconds with the repeating "we are not at home/we are not at home" there's a level of disenfranchisement that almost feels inclusive. The soaring synths don't hurt either. If there's an anthem off this record, "Language City" is surely it.
Leave the jury out for a minute and enjoy these two tracks. Sometimes life's ok.
