Wolf Parade – Terminal 5, NYC 13/07/2010

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Staring out into Terminal 5′s cavernous room, one of the two Wolf Parade frontmen, Dan Boeckner, seemed humbled by New York City’s hungry interest in the band. “It’s always great to play here!” he said, hailing his long and lean tattooed arm towards the crowd. Even before he and his mates took the stage, the packed audience was teeming with over excitement, clapping and chanting, hoping to persuade them to come out faster. Now, they had arrived.

But despite the hundreds of roaring fans that night, the show felt surprisingly intimate and engaging. Wolf Parade played a wonderfully satisfying grab bag of songs — most, of course, were off their latest Expo 86 (‘Palm Road’,‘What Did My Lover Say?’ and ‘Little Golden Age’ were definitely the highlights) — but they threw out a couple of crowd pleasers from 2008′s dark At Mount Zoomer and their splendid 2005 debut Apologies to the Queen Mary (‘I’ll Believe in Anything’ and ‘Dear sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts’ had people in the venue fist-pumping and wildly jumping around, dancing like their young ’05 selves had been brought back to life again).

Lights flashed to and fro across the stage, casting the bandmates in all hues of red, blue and gold. The other leading man, Spencer Krug, was hunched over his tiers of keyboards and synths, while glowing strobes often caught his huddled shoulders or the thick, zany curls that framed his face. But he often sat up, swung an arm up and down, swept up by the electrifying energy of both their set and the crowd’s response. Their songs, though frantic and quirky, played like bigger, more epic ones, the kinds that rile people up, stir up emotions and ultimately get a huge venue to follow their every whim. Although it had been awhile since Wolf Parade had hit the Big Apple, it seemed as though they had never even left.