By the time the floorboards of New York’s Bowery Ballroom stopped shaking Tuesday night, Wolf Parade had torched the notion that their return from hiatus was any kind of vanity play. You couldn’t be blamed for expecting that it would be: Six years removed from their last LP, five years removed from their last live performance (under their own name, at least), and nearly a decade removed from anything close to semi-mainstream relevance should not add up to what could be called a cathartic experience—and yet. They took nostalgia’s calming glow and doused it in gasoline, justifying the return of an aging band by playing more ferociously than the baby-faced acts they’ve inspired.
To be fair, for fans of indie rock, there’s arguably something to be nostalgic for—namely, a time when the term “indie rock” more closely correlated to a specific set of sounds, and a certain prevalence in music culture. The year that saw the release of Wolf Parade’s breakthrough, Apologies to the Queen Mary—2005—was bursting with albums that made good on the promise of indie rock’s potential to energize: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled debut (a real belle of the MP3 blogs), Separation Sunday from Jersey revivalists the Hold Steady, the bookish pop of the Decemberists’ Picaresque, Bloc Party’s urgent dance-punk on Silent Alarm, and the album that ushered in the mainstream’s approval of indie rock, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois.
Of those bands, Wolf Parade are most similar toClap Your Hands Say Yeah, both in their singers’ gnarly vocals and in the way they never quite managed to top their debuts. In 2015, CYHSY embarked on a victory tour, reissuing their self-titled—as Wolf Parade did with ATTQM this week—and performing the work in whole. But CYHSY had been touring and releasing music to little fanfare all the while; their blatant attempt to recapture the vibe of 2005 could be seen as novelty, even if it sold tickets. Wolf Parade frontmen Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner had been busy in the meantime, too: Krug with Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, Boeckner with Handsome Furs and Divine Fits. And yet when they returned to the banner of Wolf Parade after a five-year hiatus, it was something else. When tickets to their residencies in New York, Toronto, and London went on sale, they sold out immediately. The excitement at first seemed totally at odds with the band’s measurably small success, especially removed from the height of it.
It’s tough to say just why Wolf Parade muster such excitement. Reunions or anniversary tours are announced almost daily, this year heralding news of such engagements from Danzig and the Misfits, LCD Soundsystem, Guns N’ Roses, Puffy and Bad Boy, Thursday, At the Drive-In, Ween, Dresden Dolls and seemingly just today, Rage Against the Machine. Hell, gauging by the crowd at Tuesday’s show—the first of five this week—aging Brooklynites with disposable income are hungry for anything from decades gone by, eager to reach the vigorous heights of their youth. (At one point in the show, the band responded to a question about death, saying, “What do you mean? We’re the old ones,” and then, a second later added, “Well, you’ve gotten older, too.”) You would think it didn’t matter who took the stage, so long as they had sold out this room, or one like it, ten years ago.
Case in point: A considerable number of such dudes broke into a full-blown sing-along when Interpol’s “Evil” played between sets. But that excitement, as stoked as it was by spontaneity, paled when compared to the riotous reaction to Krug’s nervy shouting on the set’s opener, “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain”—and that’s a track from the band’s last album, the relatively uncelebrated Expo 86.
From there, it only became clearer why fans had been so hungry for tickets. What Wolf Parade did on that first album, and to a lesser extent on the follow-ups, was capture the rawness of humankind unhinged, transforming the pain of loss and feelings of displacement into rallying cries. The power of these tracks crystallized when, late in the set, “This Heart’s on Fire” brought forth fists that probably haven’t flown so hard since W. was in office, the crowd belting out the titular chorus, insisting in unison that they hadn’t grown complacent.
But the crowd’s response wasn’t guaranteed throughout: Much of Boeckner’s tracks—he and Krug split songwriting and performing duties—are straight-up rockers, and thus don’t play as well with campfire chants like Krug’s sing-song-y things do. His “Ghost Pressure” was tolerated with headbobs, and, while the solid back-to-back songs (“C'est La Vie Way”/“Floating World”) from the just-released EP 4 recapture the verve of Wolf Parade’s early days, the crowd’s reaction was pretty well-judged by Krug, who later said, “Here’s another new song, booooo!”
That’s not to say that these songs didn’t kick as hard as the others, or that the crowd didn’t appreciate them. It just implies that, like most audiences at live shows, what the packed house was looking for were the anthems. The difference is that Wolf Parade’s anthems, like those of many bands below the surface, weren’t defined by singles or chart status. They were defined by the fans, earmarked as such for the way they’re elevated in a live setting. The fans weren’t looking for the nostalgia buffet of a Weezer cruise—they were looking for a revival, and Wolf Parade gave it to them.
Last night, Wolf Parade embodied the bygone era of discovering independent music and the subsequent thrill of discovering that you weren’t alone in loving that music. Remember: When the band first broke through, Isaac Brock, who recorded much of their debut, was still a name with big cachet. Animal Collective hadn’t yet brought weirdness to the Top 20 of the Billboard 200. Neither Bon Iver nor Arcade Fire had won Grammys. Indie rock was still an almost secret thing to latch onto. The point of asking someone if they’d heard of some small band was not, as popular culture claims, to establish intellectual superiority. It was to establish connection. Now, when you ask if someone’s heard of so-and-so, they’re likely to respond, “Oh yeah, that’s that band Beyoncé and Jay are into,” or, “They’re besties with Taylor Swift, right?” Now, when someone is into “indie,” that could mean anything from the major-label synthpop of Chairlift to the chainsaw grate of Death Grips. Both of these shifts in music culture are completely OK, by the way—they’re just different than how things used to be, not all that long ago.
So perhaps it’s fine to call this show a reunion, then, just not for the band. It was a reunion for those who took pride in not being in love with the modern world in 2005, and who still take some small bit of stubborn pride in that today.