"This is the last show of a long tour," Dan Boeckner tells us early on, following one of the many "thanks, dudes" offered by way of stage banter. Last show ever? Probably not. But you could hardly be shocked if it was.
It's hard to complain about what's basically two acts for the price of one, especially when both are so proficient. But the divide evident on Wolf Parade's sophomore disc, At Mount Zoomer, is so pronounced live that it becomes equally difficult to put much faith in the band's long-term existence.
The marriage between Boeckner's more minimalist guitar anthems and Spencer Krug's prog-rock leanings has always been a curious one. But in the past, it appeared more than a marriage of convenience; they complemented one another, and there seemed to be some bond between the two songwriters. Now that their hearts and most of their time are with other loves in which they have to make fewer concessions — Handsome Furs for Boeckner, Sunset Rubdown and Swan Lake for Krug — they seem to be sticking with Wolf Parade out of a sense of obligation.
This may have been a bad night, since even their entrance was a little off — the five-piece taking about 15 minutes to surface after the house lights had gone down. And it might help if they'd reconfigure their stage to give Krug and his keyboards a more front-and-centre role alongside Boeckner, instead of relegating Krug to the side and sticking aloof second guitarist Dante DeCaro between them as a sort of buffer. But chemistry is chemistry, and it's pretty obvious when it's gone missing.
Not that Boeckner wasn't trying to engage the paying public, at least. The most charismatic of the bunch, he seemed the only one eager to be playing in a venue this size — trying on a few arena-rock moves (windmilling, no less) even during the Krug-fronted songs. His own "Language City," played at a breakneck tempo, offered a welcome surge of energy. But when even a fist-pumping anthem like "Shine a Light" (dropped oddly into the middle of the set) can elicit no better than mumbled backup vocals from DeCaro, there's only so much you can do.
Krug is the more musically ambitious of the two, and evidently boasts at least as large a following. The night's biggest cheer, not undeservedly, was reserved for its final encore, "I'll Believe In Anything," and note-perfect renditions of sprawling opuses like the new "California Dreamer" scored nearly as well. But his low-key demeanour is better suited to a more intimate venue, and with the set list religiously alternating between the two songwriters, his baroque flirtations often did little to build on the momentum of Boeckner's frenetic adrenaline bursts.
Much of this might have been overcome if a little camaraderie had been substituted for cohesion. But with the exception of an impromptu hug between Boeckner and Hadji Bakara following "Language City," there was barely any acknowledgment of one another's presence.
Wolf Parade purport to collaborate closely in the studio, and we'll have to take their word for it. But only as they closed their main set with the epic 10-minute "Kissing the Beehive" — the one song on the new album that meshes both their vocals and their songwriting styles — did they fully feed off each other's talents. Otherwise, they produced little greater than the sum of their impressive parts.