When Wolf Parade’s Apologies To The Queen Mary was released, it was as damn near perfect as an indie rock record could ever hope to be, falling somewhere in between Arcade Fire’s anthemic scope and Broken Social Scene’s hazy sprawl. 2008’s follow-up At Mount Zoomer, shifted into a murky swirl of dense, third-wave Brit pop and Springsteen-indebted rock. With it, the division between Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner’s songwriting became clear, just barely balancing the record in a sort-of-adverse symmetry. But Expo 86 doesn’t fall into the same disjointed folly that Zoomer did. Instead, the album works as a convergence of their two voices—Boeckner’s raucous riffs are funneled through Krug’s disenfranchised brand of pop, the result as gripping as it is bizarre. Huge, lumbering hooks, like those found on “Little Golden Age” and “Yulia” rock in a way that Wolf Parade has never quite managed to on their previous efforts. The Krug-penned tracks retain his trademark knack for chatty, rambling lyrics, but backing them with Boeckner’s bluesy riffs and spinning them through some fleeting electronica results in something that, for all its layers, sounds organic and fluid. Boeckner and Krug have found a middle ground where they can co-exist cooperatively, rather than competitively, and they sound all the better for it. (Subpop, www.subpop.com) Kevan Hannah