A Sporadic Review of 'I'll Believe In Anything' by Wolf Parade

Listening to the song for the first time, I almost immediately knew what it meant, the imagery was just so clear in a vague way that there could be no other explanation. For me, it was as if the horizon had been spun around the axis of the city dweller and now the landscape became the erected monument against the city which now lay at our feet. We were released from civilizations imposing ways, spilt forth from our cubicles and classrooms, removed from the artificial sense of connectedness. Now we were all worshiping together, and of each other. The gray mass of the city now bore fruit for a better place, an orchard that grew from the ashes of something reminiscent of the rural, of the natural.

In the end, people could not find their own genesis in the metropolis; they could not garner any warmth from what they have created collectively, so they stored a piece of where they truly came from deep in their hearts separately. Nobody should know what this piece of home is, nobody could falsify our own convictions, and nobody would find that two people were inconveniently the same. It was a cult of mass grievance, of mystified individuals carrying fabricated pasts. For some it was the olive tree, for others the pine forest, the stone that came from the river bed. Wolf Parade is calling the bluff on modernity, this song is telling people they could not have originated from the iron beams and concrete pavements, that no son of Adam and Eve could have come from the Big Apple, no soul of ours could have come sprung from the head lights, and most importantly, no love could have come from the “fire in the wire”.

“I’ll take you away”, he says, “to a place where no one knows your name”. Where is that place? If it isn’t in your eyes than it must be in your bones, if it isn’t in your soul, than it must be in your ghost. There is a place called home for all of us, and it doesn’t have to be a lonely place. Take me to your place of birth, and I’ll show you mine, and together we can roam an imagined world, truer than the one we’ve met.