Montreal, better known for its French-speaking majority population than its underground music scene, has inspired a lot of hipster ink lately.
North America’s most European city has seen an explosion of quality underground music and, in turn, media attention in the past five years.
Lauded in The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Spin as a hotbed on the brink of mainstream acclaim, Montreal has been steadily exporting a horde of bands to such American indie labels as Sub Pop, Merge and spinART.
Critical darling The Arcade Fire – a group that took the indie world by storm last year – serves as de facto ambassadors of the current crop. The Dears, Sam Roberts, The Unicorns, Stars and Godspeed You! Black Emperor are familiar names to any college-radio DJ. Even French-language bands like Les Georges Leningrad have found acceptance in the American underground.
If the momentum persists, the band will be as synonymous with Montreal as Bright Eyes with Omaha or The Strokes with New York. But can Montreal rival cities like New York in terms of churning out solid bands in the long run, or will the hype swallow the scene?
“This is going to be the peak year, and then it’ll cool off,” predicted Dan Boeckner, lead singer and guitarist for Wolf Parade, a Montreal indie group kicking off its U.S. tour at the Hi-Dive on Tuesday. “Bands with weight will stick around, and everything else will slide off.”
The acclaim will only heighten the perception that the music scene sprang spontaneously from the ground, Boeckner said, when really it has been there all along.
“The media attention is really bizarre,” he said. “Having a city or a specific sound to focus on is a really good way to sell records and inversely sell magazines. It’s kind of this self-perpetuating thing.”
Carly Starr, director of international marketing and promotions at Sub Pop Records, thinks Montreal’s tightknit music community has good reason to feel ambivalent about the crush of attention.
“It’s easy for bands and the people in that particular scene to feel like they’re being invaded,” Starr said. “However, the hype happens and continues for a reason. Wolf Parade and other Montreal bands are genuinely great bands that people love and are excited about.”
Canadian indie groups have dominated American college radio the past few years, with acts like Broken Social Scene, The Stills, Hidden Cameras and The Weakerthans popping up on movie soundtracks and magazine covers.
“Being another Canadian band is now a stereotype that new bands would have to push through,” Starr noted.
Steven Lex, founder of MontrealMusicScene.com, remembers when being from Montreal was far from an asset.
“It used to be a big chaotic mess,” Lex said. “It is not until recent years that more and more bands have understood the concept of cross promoting and mutually helping each other out.”
Good-natured competition among bands and businesses in Montreal contributes to the crowded, arts-friendly feel of the city. A host of music venue/restaurants such as the popular Casa Del Popolo or Le Divan Orange line colorful streets like St. Laurent in the culturally rich Mile End neighborhood. A glance at MontrealShows.com reveals nearly 60 live music venues in this city of 1.5 million.
Boulder resident Bridget Floyd spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 working in Montreal and immersing herself in the music scene.
“Even being an outsider, walking into any show it seemed that the crowd either was familiar with every band I saw or with each other,” Floyd said. “It made it really easy to meet people, just being thrust into that.”
Federal Canadian arts subsidies and a low cost of living bolster the arts scene, encouraging homegrown talent to mature locally. The Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records helps fund all aspects of bands’ development.
Wolf Parade’s Boecker sees a paradox in the results of such an environment.
“For a Canadian band to grow internationally you have to leave Canada, and when you leave Canada the grants aren’t available to you,” Boeckner said. “It’s weird because the whole thing with these grants is that (the government) wants to export Canadian culture.”
Wolf Parade’s first full-length, “Apologies to the Queen Mary,” is slated to drop Sept. 27 on Sub Pop, but Boeckner has already seen fans mouthing the lyrics to unreleased songs at shows. He appreciates the advance online buzz generated by his band’s association with other Canadian luminaries – swapping various members with The Arcade Fire, Hot Hot Heat and Frog Eyes – but he likes to think they operate largely outside the hype.
“I know there are some bands that totally feed off this,” he said. “The media says you operate as a collective, they in turn say, ‘Yeah we do.’ They just sort of embrace that, which justifies what the media says. So the next time somebody does an article on it, it’s true, whether or not it was true in the first place. In our band we try and ignore it as much as possible.”
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-820-1378 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
Wolf Parade
INDIE ROCK|Hi-Dive, 7 S. Broadway; 9 p.m. Tuesday with Dante DeCaro and b. diddle|$8|720-570-4500
