Soundcheck Magazine

Review/Photos: Sunset Rubdown w/ Elfin Saddle at Mohawk; 06.20.2009

 E-mail

Please scroll down for review

One of the criticisms often lobbed at experimental indie rock is that it is too cerebral:  the melodies are too difficult to unearth and the lyrics are too abstruse; it never really hits home. Fair enough. And really, if you like music to upload itself to your mental memory cards after one listen, then awesome on that. But it’s no real secret that one of the keenest pleasures for any lover of music is feeling that the considerable effort put into grasping a difficult album is returned in full by the depth of the artist’s work. Swordfishtrombones, Kid A, even Sergeant Pepper’s— many of our most cherished albums reveal themselves only to those who persist, those who expect to work to really enjoy.

So let’s be straight:  Spencer Krug demands and expects considerable effort from his listeners. His melodies are difficult; his lyrics are abstruse; his songs aim more for the head than for the gut. This is true of his work with Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes and Swan Lake— but it is only with Sunset Rubdown that his personal eccentricities are able to really take center stage. The band’s already formidable discography has sketched the outline of an idiosyncratic and increasingly intriguing songwriter, a man with a poet’s grasp of language and a mind that is at once playfully inventive and fiercely intelligent.

Cherub faced and bright eyed, the precociously talented Spencer Krug has always had the look of a boy genius— an appearance only exaggerated by his decidedly more debonair (Dan Bejar), more bad-ass (Dan Boeckner) and more intimidating (Carey Mercer) musical friends. But Krug is no soft-spoken undergrad honors student— nor is he “the next Isaac Brock”.   He is 32 years old, has one of the more distinctive voices in contemporary music and performs with a beguiling confidence in his bizarre phrasings and tangled compositions.

I have seen Krug play live numerous times in the past, but last night I was immediately struck by his newfound composure, his sense of self-assurance as an all-eyes-on-me bandleader. He started the show singlehandedly: vaguely strumming at a lone electric guitar, he suddenly yelped: “If I ever hurt you / it will be in self defense.” From the outset, it was clear whose show this was. Krug carried the remainder of the now classic “The Empty Threats of the Little Lord” as an almost entirely a cappella dirge, his astonishing voice doing all the heavy lifting for a complex song that requires a fair share of it. Krug has always known he can carry a song (see early piano versions of the Wolf Parade jam “I’ll Believe In Anything”), but I’ve never seen him take ownership of the stage like this before.

And that’s basically how it went. Krug owned. The flip side of this, unfortunately, is that his backing band sounded like just precisely that— a backing band. Meet Sunset Rubdown; or, Spencer Krug and the Montreal Indie Scene Totally Competent Musicians. Sure, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing— many songwriters (Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, even Bob Dylan) have voices and styles so distinct that they really only need a backing band to ‘fill out’ their sound. But I’m not sure that I’m OK with that here. I mean, wasn’t Shut Up I Am Dreaming the labyrinthine and carnivalesque yin to Apologies to the Queen Mary’s rawk-show yang? It was edgy and childlike and totally avant-garde in all the right places. But if you were to unplug Krug last night, my feeling is that you would have been served up an indie rock plain bagel— untoasted, no schmear.

Anyways, the people came to see Krug and he really put on a show, playing predominantly from his new LP Dragonslayer and 2007’s lauded Random Spirit Lover. And even if he appeared the lone attraction on stage, the density and lyrical substance of his songs provided more than enough for the brain to digest. In fact, ‘more than enough’ may well have been an understatement for many of his less devoted fans.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites