Who Let the Wolves Out?
Photo courtesy of Wolf Parade’s Facebook page
Wolf Parade’s newly released album, Thin Mind, is the indie rock band’s second release since returning from a five-year hiatus and their fifth record overall. Much like their previous three albums, Thin Mind lives in the long shadow cast by the band’s 2005 debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, a seminal record that propelled Wolf Parade to indie rock nobility and blazed the trail for the frenetic, left-handed grooves that dominated the genre’s golden era.
As the band’s first release since the departure of longtime bassist Dante DeCaro, Thin Mind marks the return to its original line-up, but that’s where the similarities end. Longtime fans could be surprised to hear the rusted edge of bristling guitars and gravelly vocals honed in their debut release, dulled to the homogenous guitar-forward riffs and neon-laced synths that permeate the album. Returning producer John Goodmanson’s maximalist approach leaves every surface so polished it’s hard to see past the veneer. Songs like “Julia Take Your Man Home” and “Out of Control”' sag under their own weight, leaving the intricate instrumentation to combat itself as each instrument fights for air. With the new glam-rock sheen, Thin Mind paradoxically feels more like the artistic leap the band may have made in the wake of Queen Mary instead of the culmination of nearly two decades of collaboration.
Despite the album’s maximalist approach, it’s surprisingly one-note. From the first lines of the opening track, “Under Glass,” Thin Mind explores the well-tread concerns of a digital age fraught with commodification and uncertainty. The lyrical stylings of Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug have proved more direct than previous releases. Thin Mind replaces the cloudy, abstract lyrics and images conjured in earlier albums with hard-edged lamentations of the modern condition. Boeckner and Krug fall into the all-too-prevalent trap of our age: the conviction that the only way forward is back.
In many ways, Thin Mind is perfectly calibrated to recapture the days of Queen Mary. But with them come the days of MySpace, bleached tips, and flip phones.
Despite treading familiar (and arguably shallow) waters, Thin Mind does offer some shining moments reminiscent of the scrappy indie trio that first stormed the scene. The album’s third track, “Forest Green,” hurls listeners through a zooming atmosphere propelled forward by rolling toms and an energetic bass line that, for a moment, reaffirms the band’s claim to their place in the indie rock pantheon. Alternatively, the album’s penultimate song “Against the Day” finally shows Wolf Parade finding their feet in the dystopian electro-rock atmosphere that was loosely wrapped around the earlier tracks. Fluid, orchestral synths float through the grim landscape, carved by cutting vocals and blistering melodies.
Thin Mind seems engineered to evoke nostalgia for Queen Mary but it never recaptures the atypical, teeming energy that made the band’s debut so enthralling. Wolf Parade’s attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle conflicts with the images of digital-age decay and despair that the band evokes. For all of its attempts to reach escape velocity, Thin Mind never quite breaks free from the past, but it doesn’t find a home there either. In the end, Thin Mind speaks to the problems of the digital age but feels stuck in the analog era.