The Llano Idea

At the very least, Spencer Krug is a busy man. Between co-anchoring the widely successful Wolf Parade with fellow prolific musician Dan Boeckner, contributing to the Canadian supergroup Swan Lake, and captaining the Sunset Rubdown ship, Krug seems to have no interest in sleeping. As if a March release of the sophomore Swan Lake album Enemy Mine wasn’t enough to satiate his musical appetite, Krug is back on June 23 with Sunset Rubdown’s latest and D&D approved LP Dragonslayer.

Getting sucked in to the blogosphere whirlwind of Dragonslayer hype a little too early, I decided to take a break from hitting the F5 key on fan forum sites and tune into one of Krug’s earliest recordings under the name Sunset Rubdown: the charming 2006 self-titled EP. Consisting mostly of solo material (although some songs include appearances from future member Camilla Wynne Ingr), the EP provides insight into how Krug composes skeletons of songs. Unfortunately unlike early Arcade Fire material, none of the five songs on the EP have gotten the pleasure of becoming meatier with a full-band arrangement and have only been sparingly performed live. Regardless, the s/t is a great listen for anyone who enjoys Krug’s interesting compositions and uniquely inflected vocals.

The disc opens with “Three Colours” where Krug’s whimsical voice breaks the tension of the opening measures with the line “Do you believe you belong to something / I can’t believe that I belong to nothing.” To mimic the repetitive fashion of the melody, this phrase is the start of all three “verses” with the only change being -thing/-one/-where. It’s not unlikely that this triptych is a part of some sort of higher plan as Krug certainly concentrates a lot on numbers and fractions on this EP as on later works. Many times he uses individual songs more like movements in an orchestral piece, where full pieces are partitioned (there are two pairs of songs split into part I and part II) and either loosely combined with others within the disc or in other albums. This method of song splitting has been Krug’s MO for a while and continues up through Dragonslayer as the track “You Go On Ahead” is subtitled “Trumpet Trumpet II”, providing the second part to the 2007 Random Spirit Lover track “Trumpet, Trumpet, Toot! Toot!”.

A personal favorite on the EP is the duo “A Day in the Graveyard I” and “A Day in the Graveyard II.” Part I is an instrumental track which sounds like it was recorded using an analog 4-track giving it that homegrown feel. Although the keyboard line is a bit on the hokey end, it is entrancing nonetheless and keeps the listeners attention before the beautiful piano kicks in to compliment the sparse percussion claps. It takes about half a minute of fuzzed out “a spaceship is approaching” noise on part II before the same melody kicks in with Krug exclaiming “There was a day in the graveyard…,” elongating the first ‘a’ in graveyard for emphasis. Vocally, this is the best track on the album as the slow moving pace of the song is perfect for Krug’s oddball vibrato and intonation on end syllables – exemplified best with the line “when the conductor fucks up / you can’t blame the symphony.”

In typical Krug fashion, it only took five months from the release of the EP before copies of their stellar full-length Shut Up I Am Dreaming hit the shelves and the collective jaws of music reviewers to drop. No matter how high Sunset Rubdown reaches with Dragonslayer it’s nice to go back to home recordings and see how all of it began.

Sunset Rubdown // A Day In the Graveyard II

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Sunset Rubdown // Idiot Heart (from Dragonslayer)

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UnclePhil Column, Music Dragonslayer, mp3, Older Stuff, Spencer Krug, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, Wolf Parade