Recorded and mixed at Hotel2Tango, with Howard Bilerman, in late February and early March of 2010, EXPO 86 is the name of the new and third album by Montreal’s Wolf Parade. EXPO 86 follows the band’s 2008 album At Mount Zoomer, which itself followed their 2005 debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary. Read the full bio for EXPO 86 here: http://www.subpop.com/artists/wolf_parade

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Wolf Parade play like members of five different bands. There's shy, Leonardo DiCaprio-looking Spencer Krug rattling his various keyboards and approximating Brian Eno and David Bowie. Lending a bottle of nervous energy, Dan Boeckner's guitar and Boss-meets-Iggy intonations bleed rock swagger. Electro-wiz Hadji Bakara brandishes various laptop modules like Olympic torches (live, he seems to pulse in his own world). By the look of his mustache and killer locks, drummer Arlen Thompson delivers his solid, catchy beats from a lost weekend with David Crosby. Newest member, Dante DeCaro, is the pop-steeped former member of Hot Hot Heat. This push-pull is one of the reasons these Canucks are such a great rock band. The other: The lineup includes two excellent songwriters.

Honoring Wolf Parade's individualist spirit, I spoke to half of the original members with a largely different sets of questions. Drums are the opening sounds on Apologies to the Queen Mary, so I caught up with Arlen first.

I. ARLEN THOMPSON

Pitchfork: First of all, why have wolves captured the hearts of indie rockers?

Arlen Thompson: I don't know. Well, I mean, the wolf has a kind of romantic image-- roaming packs scavenging the tundra for small scraps and anything they can get. For our band, that's kind of what it's about. You know, we're just scavengers and foragers. We're not very productive.

Pitchfork: I'll get the clichés out of the way: There's been a lot of critical shorthand fixating on Modest Mouse.

Arlen: Well, yeah-- and the Arcade Fire. It seems a little weird because I was never a huge fan of Modest Mouse. I never really started listening to them until we toured with them. They were probably one of Hadji's favorite bands for years. But, I think it's just that Modest Mouse has been hugely successful so it's kind of easy to drop their name in when being compared to us, like any band with kinda weird guitars and off-kilter vocals. So, yeah, Modest Mouse is the band that resonates in most people's heads.

Pitchfork: I hear more David Bowie. Well, at least in Spencer's songs.

Arlen: Oh, totally. I think Spencer's stuff falls more along the lines of Bowie or 70s Brian Eno. His singing is really close to Frog Eyes' Carey Mercer-- the same kinda vibe. We have a pretty strong, more musical kinship with Frog Eyes than with Modest Mouse.

Pitchfork: You played drums on the Arcade Fire's Funeral, which explains that whole thing.

Arlen: Yeah, I played on 'Wake Up'. I think with the Arcade Fire it's more just that we have a similar energy. The Arcade Fire are a pretty honest band when it comes to delivering a song, and we're very similar in that way-- kinda letting it all hang out.

Pitchfork: On Apologies, the Spencer/Dan songs alternate almost to a tee.

Arlen: The trade off is something we've done since the beginning. I don't know why. Sometimes now we'll play back-to-back songs. I don't know why it became like that. It just kinda works.

Pitchfork: Can we expect a Lennon/McCartney power struggle?

Arlen: [Laughs] I don't think so. I don't know. I think everyone's a little too mellow for that. I mean, the songwriting process isn't as cut and dry as with Paul and John. I like the fact that we have two songwriters. It's a really great way of providing less of a unified structure. It kinda mixes things up a bit.

Pitchfork: So each of them comes in with lyrics and everyone writes the music?

Arlen: Yeah, more or less. Spencer probably comes with the most defined songs-- a lot of times his parts or his song, or whatever, will be pretty solid and then everyone just kinda adds their own thing, fleshes things out. Dan will come in and he'll have a list or lyrics or something and we'll end up building the song around that.

Pitchfork: Who are your drum heroes?

Arlen: I'm schooled in the realm of classic rock. My father was the old rock-n-roll fan. I'd have to say, John Bonham and Charlie Watts. That's all I can say, I'm a big classic rock fan.

Pitchfork: What about someone as excessive as Neil Peart?

Arlen: No, no. I've never really gotten into the prog stuff. More like Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell and stuff like that. I'd say a person influenced me in that we grew up together is Paul Hawley from Hot Hot Heat because we grew up about two blocks from each other for years. We were always coming up with ideas and playing in different bands, and just playing off each other and stuff like that for a long time.

Pitchfork: There's been so much hype. Even mentioning the hype is cliché. Are you nervous about the inevitable backlash?

Arlen: I don't know. Obviously, this record has kinda kept building, and you feel a bit like there's a bit too much of a hype machine going on-- you wanna stop seeing photos of yourself, or whatever. But yeah, hopefully people won't hate us. [Laughs] That's all I wish for. We're nice people. We like to be liked.

Pitchfork: Have you been able to quit your day jobs?

Arlen: Not really. I mean, Hadji's going to school right now-- he's an English Lit Masters student, so he's trying to work out being on tour and being in school at the same time. And I have a job, but it's kind of flexible work. Same with Dan. Yeah, we'll still probably have to go back to our day jobs.

Pitchfork: Speaking of literature-- you mention the Marquis de Sade on your New Music Canada page. Was that tongue in cheek? Or does de Sade somehow fit into your game plan?

Arlen: [Laughs] I wrote that years ago, but I can't remember what I was going for...Yeah. I don't know that the Marquis de Sade's writing has place in Wolf Parade, really. I don't remember why. I think I was looking at the other pages bands have, and obviously people took a lot of time and were very earnest about their influence and stuff like that. [But] that point-- right after we recorded our first EP-- was only like five months after our band started. A lot of our shows were still weird art openings and stuff like that where we'd just get paid in liquor. Where it would be, 'Hey, we can't pay you, but you can drink as much liquor as you want...' So, a few of our shows were pretty ridiculous.

Pitchfork: It was your own private 120 Days of Sodom.

Arlen: Yeah, we felt like we were just a bunch of Huns raiding people's liquor cabinets.

Pitchfork: While we're on words-- there's so much haunting and ghosts on the album. Why?

Arlen: I don't know. I actually just noticed that a little while ago. It's kind of funny, you know, because you have the Unicorns, too, who have a lot of ghosts in their stuff. I guess this sounds like a cliché, but it's the imagery of remembrances of things past, of being followed around...followed by your ghosts.

Pitchfork: And there's building another world and seeing ghosts hanging from the trees-- technology haunting everything. My knowledge of how Montreal is set up is not so good, but there are a couple sections about going into the pines to find breath.

Arlen: I'm not up on my pine trees. But yeah, they're pretty coniferous over there. We're B.C. boys, so we're used to our pines and our spruces. I think with the technology thing, it's about wanting to think about going back to a simpler time where you didn't have to deal with so much bullshit, so to speak-- you know? We had a long conversation in Berlin about going back and starting a commune and getting off the grid and what it would take, but I don't know-- I think just with all stuff with technology, you know, you really feel like you're in this high tech system, but it feels like something's going to collapse. Well, we're interested in the collapse.

Pitchfork: Has hype made living in Montreal expensive?

Arlen: Montreal is becoming a more expensive city, but it probably doesn't really have to do with the music scene blowing up. It's just that, like any other city-- especially in Canada, where you only have like three major cities-- people are bound to move here if they want to live in a city.

I don't know if there are too many folks flocking there. Because the thing with Montreal that kinda isolates it weirdly is that unless you're bilingual, it's almost impossible to actually get a job because the town-- the majority is French Francophone. And so I think that stops a lot of people from coming because almost everyone who lives in Montreal, if you're English speaking, full English speaking, you know is either basically a student or have some other means. A lot of people just come for a couple months to hang out. Stuff like that. It's hard to really to make a life in Montreal unless your really fluent in the French. I'm not fluent, so...[Laughs]

Pitchfork: How do you get by?

Arlen: Well, I'm lucky to have a really great job at an English University, so I kinda fell into a thing that's pretty good. There's always this kind of exodus-- people go to school, they graduate, and then they're like, 'What will I do now?' because I don't know French well enough [to stay]. So then they move to Toronto or Vancouver.

Pitchfork: So, were you guys all English students?

Arlen: No. Hadji is an English student. Spencer studied Creative Writing and music, a bit. I studied Political Science.

Pitchfork: And now you're rock stars! Has all the attention you've received been surprising?

Arlen: Totally, it's just weird. There are definitely bands that are far more into self-promotion and stuff like that. We're at the very bottom end of that. We don't really care. We were never close to being remotely professional, even though it's kinda grown into that now. I remember while playing a show in Toronto where we were making our first demo, making copies on Hadji's laptop and putting them in zip-locked bags with photocopied inserts-- and that was only a few years ago. So, it's a bit surprising.

Pitchfork: I'm just waiting until one of you starts dating Lindsey Lohan.

Arlen: [Laughs]

II. DAN BOECKNER

Pitchfork: I asked Arlen why you divided the songs 50/50. He said, basically, it's just how it's always been done.

Dan Boeckner: Well, [Spencer and I are] both writing songs and we're both vain and nobody wants to step on anybody else's toes, basically.

Pitchfork: When I reviewed your album so positively on Pitchfork, there was some grumbling that Apologies isn't making a big statement and perhaps didn't deserve such high praise.

Dan: Apologies is hard to quantify as making a statement because you got two people writing songs with a different-- I mean there are some similarities-- but with a different lyrical approach.

When I was trying to finish the lyrics, I wanted there to be some kind of thematic link in my songs. And if Spencer wasn't in the band and if I had a different band, I think that record would have basically been a concept album about growing up in a small town in the woods of British Columbia and you know, just like, the difference between rural life and urban life. And the other big thing would be my mom dying because a lot of those songs came out of that-- which doesn't really help the Arcade Fire comparisons, but I didn't want to make a conscious decision not to write about that and distance ourselves from them, you know?

Some of my favorite records have these weird open-ended statements like The Golden River, the Frog Eyes' record, which is kind of an open-ended statement about I guess, movement, movement of people. In so many of those songs people are fleeing somewhere-- right?-- there's an exodus. And then you take another record of theirs like The Folded Palm, which is more about city life-- it seems like that whole record focuses on some mythical large town, this metaphor for a big city.

Pitchfork: That explains the ghosts and haunted worlds.

Dan: That's what happens after death. Whether it's some kind of lingering psychic energy that exists in you or just your memories. Whether your memories themselves can count as being ghosts. Are the existence of ghosts real just for you?

Pitchfork: What about the private worlds and alternative universes?

Dan: That's a really, really good way to deal with turmoil-- and some kind of bad psychic state. When my mother passed away, I dissolved whatever life I'd built in British Columbia and moved to Montreal. I cut a lot ties and built a bubble for myself to live in, which totally helped.

Pitchfork: I asked Arlen about the pine trees in your lyrics. After hearing you talk, I'm guessing they're a reference to B.C and not Montreal.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. There's a patch of woods behind my house in Cowichan Lake and it doesn't go anywhere. If you leave the front door and walk straight for hours and hours and hours you're going to run into a small town and then a bigger town and then a bigger town and you're finally going to hit Victoria. But if you go out the back door, you run into this band of really old pines and if you kept walking, you would eventually hit the ocean. There's no one in between that back door and west, basically-- you'd probably never see another living soul.

Pitchfork: What's your general feeling regarding technology?

Dan: We were stopped at this toll booth in Chicago-- you know, the last one before the city center. There's always this big snarl of traffic around it. We were there for like 45 minutes. I was looking up the street and at the Easy Pass booth there was this ultraviolet blue Blade Runner-style light that was shining into the turnstile-- I thought, I don't know what it does. I think it checks people's passes. Dante and I started talking and we were just like, what is that thing? what does it do? we have no idea what it does?

And there's this sort of alienating feeling, for me sometimes at least, where I feel like there's all this technology that is now completely embedded in the environment that we live in-- I don't understand it or i've just got to the point that i completely ignore it and that kinda freaks me out. And also, I get this feeling of decay from growing up in a small town and moving to successively larger cities. Sometimes I feel like these cities are built on snarled machines that seem tenuous and not as solid as a huge den of trees outside your house. You know what the trees are instinctively, somewhere in your back brain you know. The other stuff, you ignore it or your psyche will completely reject itself. If you start thinking about it too much you could completely drive yourself insane. The way I deal with it when I'm in a city...I take the highway by my house and mentally turn it into the river by my house in Cowichan Lake when I'm falling asleep. If I don't think of it as cars, it's just this sort of natural thing, and then it helps. That's probably really flaky.

Pitchfork: I grew up in a pine forest, too, so I relate. When I spoke with Arlen, there was also tale of an urban commune.

Dan: I don't know how far we'd get with the urban commune because we're not very organized, and any sort of communist style or socialist style or collective has always been derailed by human error.

When I was 20, I was part of Food Not Bombs in Vancouver and I took part in some protests like APEC rally protests-- I was really into that idea of communal living. But you know what happens, you set up a house with free rent and a clothes bin and communal dinners and eventually some crusty punks from Tennessee show up and start shooting Meth in the basement and never leave and the whole thing just kinda breaks down.

What I think we can do is build our recording studio in the Hundred-Sided Die with AIDS Wolf and the Seripop kids, and we can have that like as a, you know, functional recording space for our friends or whatever project wants to come up-- and do it very cheaply and just kinda of document, I guess, the decline of the Montreal music scene. I guess we've peaked. So yeah, we'll just document the last days and put it out on CD-R. Tomorrow we're gonna pick up this enormous mixing consul Arlen bought and somehow schlep it back to Montreal, but yeah, we're gonna try and pull this off. Arlen has been talking about starting his own label and then releasing CD-Rs with hand-screened covers-- we did that with the second EP and made some decent cash out of it. There's just no overheard. We spent about $20 on recording and there's no middlemen. It'll be kind of a neat experiment. Hopefully it will kind of be like those tape labels from the early '90s .

Pitchfork: Shrimper and all those.

Dan: Shrimper and Union Pole and stuff. I think a lot of the people in the band were into that stuff-- we'd all mail order noise tapes. Even the early Deerhoof stuff, I remember, came out like that in limited run.

Pitchfork: I lived in Portland during that period and was friends with Jeff of Union Pole.

Dan: No way! I was living four or five hours north in Cowichan Lake, this tiny little town, and I remember I got a copy of Snipe Hunt magazine. And they had the addresses for everything in the back and I had no access to anything and I started ordering tapes and eventually bought a 4-track. A couple of my friends who lived in the same town were like, 'Holy shit, anybody can put together a band and then record it. It doesn't matter, we'll just dub over thrift store cassettes.'

Pitchfork: I remember buying this cassette from Shrimper, and for some reason it hadn't been recorded properly and so it was Al Green or something. Maybe they forgot to dub over it.

Dan: Did you end up liking the Al Green?

Pitchfork: Yeah, I didn't bother re-ordering-- too much of a hassle to return it at that point.

Back to your studio: When we first spoke, Arlen told me that you guys were really happy with how your home-recorded tracks for the The Believer compilation ended up and that you wanted to go it more that route in the future. Are you happy with how Apologies turned out?

Dan: I'm at peace with the way the record sounds. It was a real struggle finding some middle ground between what happened during the recording process and what we wanted. We learned that you have to have your aesthetic style before you go into the studio-- you can't approach outside people with this really vague notion of how you want an album to sound and expect it to come out that way. But, that being said, I'm happy with it-- I can't not be happy with it because it exists and I have to listen to it. [Laughs]

But yeah, I like the fact that there's home-recorded stuff on there that cost us no money, and then the larger budget stuff that put us in the hole like $14,000 with Sub Pop. [Laughs] But I think it hangs together pretty OK.

Pitchfork: Are you going to keep doings stuff on Sub Pop, or Arlen's label instead? a mixture of the two?

Dan: I think Wolf Parade contractually has to do keep doing stuff on Sub Pop, which is fine-- they've been really good to us. For the year preceding the album coming out they put up with a lot of ineptitude, so...yeah, they've been very good to us, but I think every side project that this band has will try to do something with Arlen's label or other smaller labels.

Pitchfork: Is it true that after Sub Pop contacted you, it took two years for you to return their call?

Dan: I think that's actually a confusion. I went on tour with my old band Atlas Strategic with Ugly Casanova when they were on tour in the U.S. We were in Los Angeles and Sub Pop approached Atlas Strategic about putting out an album, a compilation of an EP and an album that we recorded. Basically I went home a couple of days after that tour, after leaving L.A., and we were talking about it and then my mom died and I flipped out and left and didn't call them for a really long time. But that was strictly to do with the other band. And I guess after Wolf Parade started up they were interested and I actually called them.

Pitchfork: Oh, and Wolf Parade is a joke on Mice Parade?

Dan: It's really thoroughly stupid and not very interesting, but my old band played with this band called Mice Parade from San Diego. They're like Isotope, with funny instruments. We were playing a show with them in Victoria and they were pretty standoffish right from the get go. They spent hours and hours checking all these random instruments like Chinese harp and it was just really frustrating. They weren't very nice, so we went outside and changed the marquee out front. We found this enormous airbrush painting of a wolf that we hung up behind them when they were playing and changed the name to Atlas Strategic and Spirit of Wolf Parade. And then when we were thinking up a name for this band, that's what came up because we couldn't think of anything else. [Laughs] And I had no idea there were so many wolf-themed bands!

Pitchfork: There are a few.

Dan: Oh yeah, there are a few. And I keep seeing new ones, too. It's amazing.

Pitchfork: Animal bands in general.

Dan: Animal bands and childlike drawings on album covers are sort of the new thrift store photo collage and Mark E. Smith writing. Remember when that was a big thing for a while? You had the Sebadoh albums or Archers of Loaf 7's. So you'd have this handwriting, which I think is ripped-off of Pavement, and a thrift store photo collage. Now it's maybe loopy writing and line drawings of animals or anthropomorphic figures.

Pitchfork: Pavement was just borrowing from the Fall.

Dan: Yeah, Hex Enduction Hour. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: Favorite current music?

Dan: I just purchased some records in Ann Arbor: The first Royal Trux major label album-- I love that record-- The Wonderful Frightening World of the Fall, which is one of my favorites. For the last year I've been totally obsessed with Tusk, the Fleetwood Mac record. Just the Lindsey Buckingham songs. But yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at with that.

Pitchfork: So, there have been a ton of knee-jerk comparisons made between Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire. Is there another band you'd rather be compared to?

Dan: I'm not sure. I think there's elements of a lot of different bands. I don't think there's any one band that I would compare us to. We're a weird band. Spencer's songs are so totally different than mine and he's coming from a completely different place. [Pause] Fleetwood Mac! There you go. Multiple songwriters...[Laughs], multiple aesthetics.

Pitchfork: First you need to get a Stevie Nicks in the band. Okay, go find yourself a Wiccan spiritualist.

Dan: [Laughs] We also need about $1.8 million to blow on a cocaine hell vanity record like Tusk. That'll be the next one. We'll do our Tusk.