Since the wild success of their debut, a seemingly endless strain of iterations of Wolf Parade have risen to prominence (Handsome Furs for Dan Boeckner, Sunset Rubdown and Swan Lake for Spencer Krug). For Boeckner, Handsome Furs was Wolf Parade chilled out and made more accessible. For Krug, his projects were an outlet for all the weirdnesses that Wolf Parade didn’t offer him room to express, but were also generally more reserved than Wolf Parade. At Mount Zoomer marks the two songwriters returning to the project that made them famous after a sizeable break dedicated to their respective side projects. The second record lacks the blaring, caterwauling abandon that made its predecessor so appealing. It’s tamer, less gritty, and ultimately, way less compelling.

Spencer Krug’s contributions are all much more structured and carefully arranged than anything he offered on Apologies to the Queen Mary. “Bang Your Drum” has neatly cohesive and airtight band figures. “California Dreamer” is his best effort here – it builds from a brooding keyboard-laced verse into an explosive chorus on par with anything off Apologies, and then descends into a chaotic, noisy interlude, which returns again, beautifully, to a last percussive chorus. “An Animal in Your Care” is a strange, monotonous Sunset Rubdown-inspired ballad that lacks any tonal foundation at all. It’s safe to say the edge Krug displayed on Apologies has been replaced by the meandering melancholy of the “brooding genius.”

At the heart of the record’s weakness, however, you will find Dan Boeckner, who almost completely fails to deliver on Wolf Parade’s sophmore LP. “Language City” is the first of many atrocities he commits on this album. It’s a shame, really; when he delivered some really great tunes on the band’s debut (“Modern World”, and the fantastic closer “This Heart’s on Fire”, among others). On At Mount Zoomer, his songs sound cheap and rushed. “Language City” has no hook to speak of, no cohesive structure; it’s a song lost in the woods. “The Grey Estates” suffers from much of the same problem; it’s among the most forgettable tracks on the album. Crescendi build to unsatisfying anticlimaxes, which grow increasingly frustrating with their frequency. There is a tension in this song that makes it less compelling and more taxing.

Boeckner seems to have brought Handsome Furs into the studio this time around with Wolf Parade. Of course, there’s a reason the songs the Furs perform aren’t recorded with Wolf Parade – the sort of bare-bones, melancholy indie they play is out of sync with Wolf Parade’s strengths. But Boeckner’s songs seem to have been written with that side project in mind; they lack the clarity of purpose that his contributions to Apologies to the Queen Mary displayed.

Whatever energy there is on this record sounds way less natural than it did on Apologies to the Queen Mary. It sounds like these guys are trying harder to sound like themselves than they should have to. As a result, Zoomer isn’t half as sharp as its predecessor. It’s got less focus, it’s less memorable, less sincerity; it just doesn’t satisfy. It’s a sophomore slump that we all, I suppose, should have seen coming; after such an impressive debut, the bar was set so high, that they would never have been able to recreate that wild frenetic character of their debut, so they went another way. But in doing so, the band has played to very few of its strengths. It might sound like a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation, and maybe it is. But Wolf Parade is better than this. Their debut proved that. They have some big shoes to fill. Back to work.

5.3 / 10.0