At Mount Zoomer

Sure, you can kind of tell--except for the finale--they each sing four songs and their styles are unmistakable; however, they result in one tight, unified, startling beast of an album--it’s downright astonishing.

At Mount Zoomer is interesting and focused, but safe.

Like debut "Apologies to the Queen Mary," the band’s sophomore LP is as shaggy and sharp as the its lupine muse: Fierce, but Wolf Parade is too cagey to sacrifice discipline for ferocity; they attack with tact.

At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second--that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution--is as thrilling as it terrifying.

While Mount Zoomer is not likely to stand as Wolf Parade’s definitive statement, it does represent a bold step in a new direction and gives us a good idea as to where the band is headed: anywhere but the mainstream.

It's largely indecipherable, totally animalistic and frequently breathtaking.

With At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade has quite easily surpassed the greatness that was their debut, and have very quietly made one of the better albums of 2008.

If you have an itch you can never scratch for whoopingly hollered songs about radio waves being "like snow", then Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner's band will be like a welcome ice cube on a mosquito bite. If you don't, they will become the mosquito.

While At Mount Zoomer is occasionally faceless, at least it's a good faceless. There isn't a bad song here, just few great ones.

The time between now and its 2005 Sub Pop debut, "Apologies to the Queen Mary," allowed the group to more fully develop its sound. At Mount Zoomer expands upon the bits-and-pieces pop approach of its debut into a solid set of rock songs.

At Mount Zoomer is a tremendous success.

Although "Queen Mary" was a strong showing, At Mount Zoomer--named for the band's recording space--is an instant classic, distancing itself from indie rock's skin-deep quirks on the way to something grander and more enduring.

While Zoomer is a perfectly decent collection of piano-riddled pomp and sprawling raucous songcraft, it suffers somewhat from the Indie Rock Slumpy Sophomore Syndrome. [20 June 2008, p.67]

It’s breathtaking, it’s assured, it’s a perfect finale, it LIVES UP TO THE HYPE.

Upping the studio gloss, turning the amps up--way up--and reining in their more twee impulses, the Montreal bloggers' heroes unleash their inner beast, growing by taking a page out of their colleagues' playbooks.

At Mount Zoomer will get hipsters dancing around once again, but I think the respect and hype is most definitely due to Wolf Parade this time.

It's an irresisitible, exhilarating mix that sounds like no band but Wolf Parade.

Arcade Fire never babbled about “horse-shaped fire/Draggin’ stereo wire.” These guys make it seem like an Olympic sport.

There’s not much here that will surprise longtime fans of Krug and Boeckner’s work, although they have slowly turned the wheel and moved the Wolf Parade sound on from "Apologies to the Queen Mary."

The two men’s reedy voices come across as more harried than heroic. And often the keyboard bits are linked into structures that are neat yet crowded; just when one riff grows familiar and hummable, an eager new one shows up to displace it. It’s invigorating during a song, but a little exhausting over the length of an album.

Rather than stick to two sides of the coin, this new material satisfyingly splinters in myriad directions. [Summer 2008]

At Mount Zoomer will give you those same goosebumps you felt when you heard the band’s debut.

With a tidy nine tracks, At Mount Zoomer seems like it would be trimmed of any unnecessary filler, but somewhere in the second half things begin to wilt with only shades of interesting ideas.

Thankfully, At Mount Zoomer is a formidable collection of catchy indie art-rock that won’t disappoint fans of their acclaimed debut.

Regardless of the songwriter, the lyrics overlap from track to track, and no doubt there will be a few erudite folks campaigning to weave a singular poetic storyline for our edification. Whether this is by design, or simply the product of the fanciful imaginations of Wolf Parade fans, the casual listener is rewarded with a batch of songs that works best when taken from a beginning-middle-end perspective.

At Mount Zoomer finds them making a giant leap forward, its surfeit of innovation defying easy categorisation. [Aug 2008, p.145]