At the risk of getting dangerously meta on you: whenever I sit down to write a review, I always have a pretty good idea of what I want to say about something. The points I want to make, the things I want to single out for praise or criticism, and so on. But sometimes I want to write a review, and I really think about it a lot, but nothing comes to me. I end up back in my 8th grade days, thinking that reading and writing reviews is pointless, and all you need to know is whether something sucks or not. Well, I've been trying to write a review of Apologies to the Queen Mary for almost 3 years now and I'm still drawing a blank.
Mind you, this isn't an issue of the album being so overwhelming that my response to it is to just sit here, mouth agape, going "guh guh guh guh guh" and gesticulating wildly. For instance, I watched the movie Old Boy a few hours ago and I was nearly catatonic by the time the credits rolled. With Apologies to the Queen Mary I can't think of anything to say because nothing intelligent or incisive comes to mind. I feel like, even after hearing their new album At Mount Zoomer I'm still not far enough away from Apologies to see the big picture. No ideas or critical conceits come to mind when trying to craft this review because it's just a fantastic album that needs no explanation.
See??
You can't tell, but I just sat here listening to 'Fancy Claps' instead of writing something.
This is an album that lives in moments, in the realizations you have on the bus home from somewhere or when you go for a walk at night, your head spinning with thoughts that never settle. It lives in vivid scenes of beauty, love, loss, pain, and separation. It spins poetry out of lyrics and ideas that are the little clever things we think of and say everyday but never write down because we think they're too pedestrian:
"You said you hate the sound
Of the buses on the ground
You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town
I said pretend it’s whales
Keeping their voices down."
I genuinely believe that as time goes on, this album will stand as one of those generational masterpieces that we can look back to not just as a fun, enjoyable album, but as a work of art with depth and substance. I don't use terms like "zeitgeist" often, but if there is a zeitgeist to be captured out there, right now, then Wolf Parade have captured it with this album. My appreciation and understanding for it has only increased with time. It helps, too, that though this was the first major work from co-leaders Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, they both turn in high watermarks with 'Shine A Light' and 'I'll Believe In Anything', respectively, the latter of which I think is one of the top songs of the decade thus far. Along with 'Purple Bottle' by Animal Collective, it's also one of my favorite love songs, though they're both very skewed and odd love songs. But I'm odd and skewed too, so...
We've all got a few albums that we have an emotional attachment to, an attachment that doesn't allow us to step back from the music at hand and deliver some semblance of a sensible evaluation of. Sure, it's still subjective. But I love In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and react emotionally to it, yet I can still write a decent review about it without words failing me. I think I've proven, though, that I can't do the same for Apologies to the Queen Mary. I love this album so much that I can't explain why I love it. It transcends the indie rock genre even if the tools it uses--glossy-but-not-retro-or-lame keyboards, whip snap drumming, melodic bass, crisp guitars, unique and affected vocals--are almost standard. I don't want to read anything critical about it because to me it's as perfect a thing as I'm likely to get in this world and I don't want it diminished. I like a lot of albums, but it's very rare that they end up meaning something to me.
Apologies to the Queen Mary means something to me.
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