Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug emerges with Sunset Rubdown
June 9th, 2009 by Ben Westhoff in Music news
SIDE HUSTLE: Sunset Rubdown
Sunset Rubdown with Witchies, and Elfin Saddle. $10 advance. $12 door. 9 p.m. Tues, June 16. Drunken Unicorn, 736 Ponce de Leon Ave. www.thedrunkenunicorn.net.
Better known for his work with Montreal indie powerhouse Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug also fronts Sunset Rubdown — a band emerging as his most compelling side project.
Sunset Rubdown surfaced in 2005 as a lo-fi solo platform for Krug to experiment with his primary instrument, the keyboard. Early works like Snake’s Got a Leg and Shut Up I Am Dreaming were promising — if not always entirely satisfying — productions. The act eventually took on a full roster of players and began incorporating more traditional melodies and focusing its metaphor-rich lyricism, culminating in 2007’s highly acclaimed Random Spirit Lover.
Nowadays, Sunset Rubdown sounds more than ever like a full band. The latest release, Dragonslayer, due out in late June, largely abandons the act’s previous idiosyncratic tendencies in favor of, well, different idiosyncratic tendencies. Echoing the epic quality and progressive rock flavor of Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer, most of Dragonslayer’s tracks are well over five minutes long, and its charging, magnificently overblown finale “Dragon’s Lair” clocks in at 10-and-a-half.
UPDATE: Broken link below has been fixed.
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(Photo by David Horvitz)
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