| Apologies to the Queen Mary | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio album by Wolf Parade | ||||
| Released | September 27, 2005 | |||
| Recorded | Audible Alchemy, Portland, OR, and Montreal September 2004 to Spring 2005 |
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| Genre | Indie rock | |||
| Length | 47:48 | |||
| Label | Sub Pop | |||
| Producer | Isaac Brock, except tracks 4, 5, and 7 by Wolf Parade | |||
| Wolf Parade chronology | ||||
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Apologies to the Queen Mary is the highly-acclaimed first full-length album by Canadian indie rock band Wolf Parade.
Contents |
Songwriting and vocals are split between guitarist Dan Boeckner and keyboardist Spencer Krug.
According to interviews with the band, the album is named after an incident in which the band was removed from the ocean liner Queen Mary for breaking down the door of a ballroom and staging a violent séance.
The album achieved a score of 83 out of 100 on Metacritic,[1] appeared in the Canadian edition of Time magazine's list of "Canada's Most Anticipated Indie Albums of the Year", and was shortlisted for the 2006 Polaris Music Prize.
The song "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts" refers to Pretas of Buddhist mythology. The "Hungry Ghosts" – beings who, because of actions in their past lives, are always hungry and thirsty, but cannot eat or drink – are used by Krug as a reference to his generation.[2]
The songs "Killing Armies" and "Modern World (Original Version)" were added to the iTunes Music Store release.
The songs "Fancy Claps", "Same Ghost Every Night", and "This Heart's On Fire" were not originally from an EP. All of the other songs, including "Killing Armies", came from the three previous EPs, except "I'll Believe In Anything". This song appeared on the album Snake's Got a Leg by Sunset Rubdown (another Spencer Krug project), which was recorded in 2004 and released in July 2005.
Krug has stated that "You Are a Runner" is "more about who I am in relation to my family, my father. That song is just about, well, I'm not going to get into great detail, but my father is a certain way, and there are days when it's obvious to me that I could turn out that way, and that's not a way I want to be, and it has a certain effect on the people who are close to him, and then I see the people that are close to me getting affected in the same way. That's it on a basic level, I sort of…I don't want to get into it beyond those vague terms. "Grounds for Divorce" is just about breaking up. The divorce is symbolic, it's not a real divorce."[2]
The music video for "I'll Believe in Anything" was named "Music Video of the Year" at the PLUG Awards.
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | [3] |
| The Guardian | [4] |
| Pitchfork Media | (9.2/10)[5] |
| PopMatters | [6] |
| Prefix Magazine | (9/10)[7] |
| Rolling Stone | [8] |
| Stylus Magazine | (A)[9] |
| Tiny Mix Tapes | [10] |
| Yahoo! Music | [11] |
| Sputnikmusic | [12] |
Online music magazine Pitchfork Media placed Apologies to the Queen Mary at number 89 on their list of top 200 albums of the 2000s.[13] Cokemachineglow named it the 5th greatest album of the 2000s.[14]
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