Astute readers will have noted that Discotheque has been based in New York for the last couple of weeks. Besides providing the best bagels in the universe and such surreal sights as Jon Bon Jovi slouching on the stoop outside your building shooting a video for his latest pop tune, New York is also a premier league Eden when it comes to live music.
Every night of the week, there are more gigs and concerts happening throughout the city than you can ever hope to fit in. When the excellent Oh My Rockness e-mail bulletin listing NYC gigs for the next seven days arrives in your mailbox every Thursday, all you can do is groan at what you will miss.
Whatever about gambling on what Manhattan has to offer on a nightly basis, add in the other boroughs and Jersey and it really is a case of picking a number and taking your chances. You may see the best new band in the city or you may see someone that has you wishing you had asked Jon to sing you an auld song.
Every year, thousands of new bands come out of the rehearsal closet and start to preen. The vast majority of these bands don't even make it beyond the new band catwalk. If you think this fact of life is cruel, heartless and ruthless, you are in the wrong business. Yet the music industry relies on new blood. The bands who were your favourite new band in 2004 need to be replaced with fresh stock, so the search for new stars is a constant one. After all, it's the excitement and thrill of hearing a new act who will rock your world that keeps you going back to that skyscraper of new CDs and those live gigs.
There is a filtering process in place to initially separate the wheat from the chaff. You rely on recommendations, reviews, tips and the like to decide what you'll listen to first of all. But you still take a chance on someone you've never heard of every now and again. Sometimes, you're glad that you did. That was the case with Wolf Parade. After seeing them live, it's easy to understand just why there has been such an Arcade Fire-like internet buzz about the latest contenders who've shambled this way from the Plateau area in Montreal.
It's probably why last week's New York show was sold out weeks in advance. This time next year, Wolf Parade may be stuffing tents with punters at festivals like the Electric Picnic, or their I'll Believe In Anything song may be the tune that U2 play before going onstage. Thanks to all the chatter and the fact that their remarkable Apologies to the Queen Mary debut album is gathering the same kind of acclaim and accolades that Funeral accumulated, everyone wants to see them.
Right now, Wolf Parade are the bleeding edge of indie rock. The songs are bright and burning. The music is fuzzy and frantic. The sound has room for everything from the rundown, ramshackle blues of Tom Waits and the groovy intensity of Talking Heads to the driving, emotional vintage of Nirvana. Yet what makes Wolf Parade so absorbing is how they're not merely the predictable sum of these parts. They've forged a new answer to a familiar conundrum by adding grace, elegance and vulnerability to the equation. It's a sure sign that they really can go anywhere from here.
Wolf Parade play Whelans, Dublin on November 27th
