I'll Believe in Anything

Spencer Krug writes romantic declarations the way someone might confess under pressure — urgent, slightly unhinged, more committed than the situation perhaps warrants. "I'll Believe in Anything" is the clearest expression of this tendency in Wolf Parade's catalog, a song that opens with Krug's piano tumbling forward as if it's been shoved from behind, guitars scraping in behind it with barely controlled velocity. His voice is rough-edged and nasal, not conventionally beautiful, but that quality becomes the point — the imperfection is the sincerity. The song is structured as an ecstatic profession of devotion that keeps escalating past the point where rational people stop, and the music matches this by building toward a climax that feels genuinely out of control in the best way, the whole band throwing themselves at the final section as if they've stopped caring whether it holds together. Produced during the Modest Mouse years with Isaac Brock's fingerprints faintly visible in the emotional extremity of it all, it captures a particular strain of mid-2000s Canadian indie rock that wasn't interested in coolness. This is music for the moment you've decided to throw yourself into something regardless of how it ends — first days, new cities, people you've chosen to trust completely before you have any reason to.