Album Review: Apologies To The Queen Mary by Wolf Parade

Montreal quartet Wolf Parade's full-length debut fully lives up to the potential bred by their early EPs. They use Apologies to the Queen Mary producer Isaac Brock to their best advantage, acknowledging their debt to Modest Mouse but using his ear as a resource to tinge their endearingly brittle indie pop tunes accordingly. Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner both sing in that certain kind of wry yelp that seemed so quirkily marketable in the mid-2000s -- see the Shins, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Hot Hot Heat -- and it doesn't hurt that most of Wolf Parade's songs are distinctive, too.

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It's not hard to see why Apologies to the Queen Mary is so good in comparison to Wolf Parade's encouraging but somewhat frustrating teasers: there's more of it. At less than fifty minutes, it's still twice as long as the longest of their three self-titled EPs (the 2004 one), which affords it room to spread out and set up its own complex networks of melody and imagery, posit a sound and then play with variations, and otherwise capitalize on the advantages of the full-length format. It's much trickier to put a finger on why Apologies to the Queen Mary is so good in the first place.

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