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

After a few days of distance, I believe I could have done more justice to this review now that my thoughts have come to be more clear and concrete. This album deals with human genesis on an emotional level. Its revolt stems from two main dissatisfactions that come from, I believe, a mass media and industrialized setting. The first dissatisfaction is a dissatisfaction of expression, the feeling that our common usage of idioms, metaphors and social types fail to capture what we ourselves feel is the true nature of our relationships. Mass media is seen as a culprit here, because its reach is so far, and so encompassing, that any new form of expression would have to be checked with a large body of preexisting symbols, or else face the consequence of being marginalized, or worse misunderstood, or even worse, seen as a petty play of rearranging clichés. Wolf Parade’s solution to this problem is using metaphors that are so personal and absurd, that they dislocate a given situation with the language we normally use to think about it. The signified is cut off and rescued from the signifier, and its meaning seems to seep past its former boundaries and reconnects itself with a deeper conscious. You would be lying if you claimed to understand all the metaphors in that album, because they are not made to be understood, instead they are made so that you can make your own connections, feel your own liberation from preconfigured ways of expression.

The second dissatisfaction is a dissatisfaction with modern society. People locked in high-rises, enduring tedious work hours, taking in the clanking city sounds all around them. Our ambivalence with the city creates an interesting dynamic, as some embrace it wholeheartedly, taking the good with the bad, the smog with and bright city lights, the sin and the glamour. Some deject it, and search for other places to live like the suburbs or the countryside, while limiting contact as much as possible. As artists, the ambivalence receives another layer in songs like “Modern World”, for it is precisely the contrast of constraint and free-play that their music gains flair. In most of these songs there are two distinct parts, one is highly structured part, featuring a set pace and a “comprehensible” melody; the other is a tearing down of the first part, featuring a changing pace, often an acceleration to the point of destruction, and weird yet pleasing tunes. Each half taken alone is not spectacular, but when combined they create a rushing sensation, an explosive impetus in their music. Their music is a metaphor for oppression and resistance, both which cannot be felt without being placed in juxtaposition with the other.

In the opening of this blog I’ve written that the album was about ‘human genesis ’, now that we examined the two dissatisfactions of the album I will turn back to the conclusion given. It is a very simple message up front, one that simply points out the rigidness of our culture and the inhumane conditions of our society, suggesting that the human soul could not have come from modernity, hence encouraging us to find our own roots in objects and places of personal significance. We can capture some of our true selves in abstract metaphors, secret memories of sacred places and such. The message becomes more complex when it reveals itself to unconfident in its own suggestions. What if modernity is so ingrained in us that our departure from it is only a reconfiguration of its template? What if this yearning can only come from a heightened awareness of our individuality, which can only come from modernity? What if there is simply no human soul, no identifiable, unique and integrated ‘thing’ that belongs to only ourselves? There is a deep anxiety that haunts all of Wolf Parade’s achievements.

I believe there is ample literature on the modern discontents, and hence I do not feel a need to link the two dissatisfactions in to an overarching scheme, or point out a single source. In the end, the music deals with the significance with the conditions we are set in. In my eyes, “Apologies to the Queen Mary” is not an escapism album, but a reminder and a celebration of an individual soul lurking behind imminent extinction.

P.S This could have replaced the previous article of the same review, but I was interested to show the progress from an emotional, spur-of-the-moment review, to the clear-headed version. I don’t believe that logic is ad-hoc to the conclusions of human emotion, on the contrary it works best when given such significance.