Crib Notes

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.

Continue reading “Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug emerges with Sunset Rubdown”

(Photo by David Horvitz)

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By Ben Westhoff

Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, arguably the reigning prime minister of indie rock, produced most of Wolf Parade’s first album, Apologies to the Queen Mary. Though the album won a rave review from Pitchfork and catapulted the band into the, um, underground rock stratosphere, something was off.

Many noted its strong similarities to Modest Mouse’s sound, and co-frontman Spencer Krug now describes it in even harsher terms. “I listen to some of those songs off Apologies to the Queen Mary and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I wrote them,’” he says, speaking by phone while watering his plants at his home in Montreal. “I don’t even know where I started. Some of them are so convoluted, I have no idea what I was doing.”

Although he has nothing but kind things to say about the work of Brock – who also signed the band to Sub Pop in 2004 – he opines that using an outside producer wasn’t the best strategy. “We probably just weren’t ready to work with anyone at that point,” he says, adding that other factors kept the tracks from gelling. “Apologies to the Queen Mary was made up of songs that were written over a period of two, two-and-a-half years…. It felt sort of disparate to us.”

Read the rest of this story here.

Wolf Parade performs with Wintersleep at the Variety Playhouse on Mon., July 28.

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