“At Mount Zoomer”
Wolf Parade, $13.98

Listening to Wolf Parade’s sophomore album, I find myself drawing comparisons to a combination of potential influences including U2, the Thompson Twins, Billy Joel and Semisonic — that final one especially, due to the vocals and piano throughout.

With heavy use of synths on much of the record, this is, to me, pretty much an attempt at something I like to call “new new wave” (and a Google search just now has confirmed that I am not the first person to come up with that term, to my disappointment) with a good dose of indie grit. It’s like Flock of Seagulls meets Modest Mouse, successfully resulting in a sound superior to both on their own devices.

The thing that I find very interesting while hearing each song on this album is that many of them only excel for moments at a time. There are rhythm shifts that make my heart thump (in a good way, not a medical-emergency way) and epic crescendos that send shivers through my bones (again, in a good way). The rest of the time, I find myself zoning out and become distracted. The music is largely only stimulating in bursts, but those bursts manage to redeem the remainder.

When the opening track, “Soldier’s Grin,” starts in, it doesn’t sound particularly awesome, but about two-and-a-half minutes in, there is a moment where I love it so much, I’d marry it. In “Call It a Ritual,” the vocal melody makes me melt at just about the one-minute, ten-second mark. I actually really disliked “California Dreamer” on first, second and third listen, but that’s because I let myself become too distracted early on and my attention was consistently elsewhere when the good parts happened.

Some songs really do go the distance, though. “Language City” is just one long burst of awesome. “Fine Young Cannibals,” as light and threadbare as it comes across, is actually what I’d consider the most engaging track on the record.

The album is less interesting during “The Grey Estates” and “An Animal in Your Care.” The former sounds less evolved than of what the rest of the album shows the band to be capable. The latter is thin, and it meanders in a way that never actually leads it anyplace good.

The final track, “Kissing the Beehive” (clocking in at nearly 11 minutes long), unintentionally shares its name with a Jonathan Carroll novel. The instrumentals — especially the break approaching the middle of the song — are very pretty and interesting. The whole thing goes on too long, though. The band could have cut out about three minutes from the end of the song and had something much more relevant.