Photographed for Spin at Hadji Bakara’s house, Spencer Krug’s house, and Wolf Parade’s studio in Montreal, April 29, 2008

HADJI BAKARA
Following up a revered debut album
with a more, um, challenging one often
inspires catty backlash. But the scruffy
Canadian indie rockers of Wolf Parade
are too busy playing in 17 other bands
to worry. Is this the new careerism?

ARLEN THOMPSON

MONTREAL IS ONLY 47 MINUTES FROM NEW YORK IN a plane no bigger than a school bus. But on this cloudy late April morning, each of those 47 minutes is teeth-gnashingly, stomach-churningly turbulent, making it impossible to forget that you are, in fact, not on a school bus, but rather inside a thin metal tube careening rapidly 35,000 feet above the ground in a manner antithetical to man’s nature. But here’s the thing about even the most harried trip to Canada: When you get there, you’re surrounded by Canadians, which, at the risk of gross generalization, is a fair panacea for gnashed teeth and churned stomach.

Wolf Parade are Canadian. Not just in the sense that they’re from Canada, but Canadian—laconic, genial, unflappable. How else to explain a band that sold 120,000 copies of their hiccupy, Bowie-tinged art-punk debut and, on the eve of their second, still don’t have a manager or a website? Or that only two members own cell phones, and their cofounder is in at least four other bands? They may not be the model of efficiency, but this is by design, an ambivalence born not of laziness—Wolf Parade are anything but lazy—but maybe rather culturally ingrained, as if the very notion that people might find what they do Important violates centuries’ worth of inherited humility.

“When we were kids, there was that clear divide between Fugazi and Guns N’ Roses, and that line is blurry now,” says singer and keyboardist Spencer Krug, 31, in a barely-there whisper that belies the tremulous yelp he’s semifamous for. “So for us to be able to pay rent because there’s more than 200 people who are into our records...” Krug’s voice trails off as he

By STEVE KANDELL Photographs by MICHAEL SCHMELLING

MONTREAL