Like Kay, I was at the Arcade Fire/Spoon show at Merriweather last Friday. All of it was fantastic, but the most surprising moment was Spoon's cover of "Modern World" by Wolf Parade. Apparently they've being playing it for much of the Transference tour; here's them with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade at Radio City Music Hall:
Wolf Parade has sort of fallen off the radar; its latest album, Expo 86 arrived in June without much fanfare, and 2008's At Mount Zoomer went nowhere. Some of this is no doubt due to Spencer Krug, who with Boeckner makes up the band's songwriting duo, spending more time with his other band, Sunset Rubdown. But Expo and Zoomer, despite tracks like "What Did My Lover Say?" and "Call It a Ritual", were bound to be disappointing after Apologies to the Queen Mary, their debut. It sounds just as viscerally exciting, and shockingly consistent, now as it did five years ago. Here's the opening track, "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son":
"Modern World" is a great song, but coming after that even it feels like just another album track. Queen Mary got some love at end-of-decade list season, but it appears, like Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights, to have set itself up to be ignored later on. When your next albums are going to be, of necessity, merely okay, the band's brand generally is damaged, and people are less inclined to revisit the album that got them interested in the first place.