We Are Wolves

As Montreal enjoys its current status as the hippest spot for music in the world, you can’t deny how exciting it is to see a place so rich in diversity keep the bands coming. And We Are Wolves are just the kind of young band to keep that ball rolling. Forming in 2000, but not really taking things seriously until just over a year ago, the art-schooled trio (a bassist, keyboardist and drummer) fuse deep throbbing bass riffs, pitch oscillating analogue synths and powerful thumping drums (both live and machine) to secure their fabulously menacing post-punk. There’s a definite influence from their arty backgrounds in the overall vision of the music. Any linear concept, such as a verse-chorus-verse song, may exist, but not long before the band deconstructs such a thing and then reconstructs it in the most obscure fashion. The three members join forces to spit their lyrics in fierce English, saving their French for the album’s equally eloquent instrumentals. Not quite as challenging as Les Georges Leningrad, but very much in the same wildly exotic stratosphere, We Are Wolves are the best new thing to come out of their city and Non-Stop Je Te Plie En Deux is just the right vehicle to take them places.

The wolf seems to be a hot commodity lately for band names in Montreal. Bassist Alex: It’s kind of a fashion that just came out last year, but AIDS Wolf, Wolf Parade and We Are Wolves have been around for quite a while. People have just started going, "Hey how come there’s so many wolf bands?” But it’s everywhere, not just in Montreal. Drummer Antonin: Really, we don’t know how to deal with it. Alex: For a while before we got the album out we thought, "Should we change our name?” We thought about it in French, which is "nous sommes loups,” but we wanted the impact, so we stuck with it.

Is there any reason why English is only used for songs with lyrics and French is only used for the instrumentals? Antonin: Seriously? We didn’t know that. Alex: It’s really hard sometimes in Montreal to deal with the French Community and the English community. For us, it’s easier just to sing in English. It’s easier to construct words together and give sense to the lyrics. Keyboardist Vincent: French songwriting has a huge history with the really classy poetic stuff. Singing in French you’ve got to deal with that. It’s kind of easier just to build up sentences and slogans in English, which are still really powerful without having to deal with the entire history of songwriting.