This Heart's on Fire

Wolf Parade's *Apologies to the Queen Mary* is one of indie rock's great debut documents, and this Spencer Krug track exemplifies why. His voice is cracked and urgent, somewhere between ecstasy and collapse, layered over keyboards that build with a kind of reckless forward momentum. The production is deliberately rough, with a live-performance energy that sounds like the tape was rolling before anyone was ready. Lyrically it's about desire so strong it constitutes its own kind of danger — love described through heat imagery, the heart as something actually combustible. Krug's writing at this period had a surrealist fever to it, Montreal's art-rock scene pushing his instincts toward the theatrical. There's something almost religious in the intensity, a conviction that feeling this much must mean something. Best heard young, when love still seemed capable of being genuinely catastrophic.