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Album Review: Moonface – With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery [Jagjaguwar]



Spencer Krug is a genius. There’s not a whole lot of ways to disprove that statement, except in saying that one person’s gold is another person’s trash, and vice versa. We’re all entitled to our opinions. But one needs only to look at Krug’s track record to find evidence of his brilliance. He was a member of Frog Eyes during their most creative period. He went on to become one of two principal singers and songwriters in Wolf Parade, whose three full-length efforts range from very good to one of the best of the last decade. His solo work as Sunset Rubdown eventually became a full band as well, and everything from Shut Up I Am Dreaming onward has been one fascinating conceptual musical experiment after another. Krug also dipped his ink into the indie supergroup Swan Lake along with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer, leading of course to more general acclaim. To think all this work, 8 albums and 3 EPs, was produced between 2005 and 2010. Suddenly, it was almost like a light switch flipped off.

Krug introduced yet another new project in early 2010 that he called Moonface. An initial EP called Dreamland: Marimba and Shit-Drums followed closely behind, a single 20-minute track in which he played around with the titular instruments. Late last summer came the first Moonface LP Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped, which was yet another effort informed by its title. The album was 5 tracks over 37 minutes, with the shortest song clocking in at just over 6.5 minutes. Much of it was droning, flat and uninspired. It was a true introduction to what Krug truly hopes Moonface will be – a name under which he can try anything and everything his heart desires without being bound to the conventions of traditional songwriting or structures. There is no easy way to define the sound of Moonface, because it keeps changing with each new release and that’s the way Krug likes it. On this new Moonface record, his second in a year, he’s made the choice to collaborate with the Finnish band Siinai, who sound a lot like Explosions in the Sky but with less guitar and more piano/synths.

The end product, With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery, is in some ways a return to form for Krug. With a full band behind him, he suddenly finds himself grounded once more. The songs get shorter, have verses, choruses and hooks, and burst forth with a refreshing urgency. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good though. This is certainly a far cry from the Shut Up I Am Dreaming days where the arrangements were much sparser and in some ways more virile. It seems difficult for Siinai to do anything halfway or minimal, but you’d think that’d lend itself perfectly to Krug’s lyrics, which tend to be flights of fancy involving kings and dragons and wars fought over a woman. Yet these complex and widescreen topics appear to be less important to Krug these days, and the more literal, to-the-point lyrics he tried out on the last Moonface record continue here. “I’ve got the blood/but not the bloodlust you need,” he moans on “Heartbreaking Bravery” amidst shimmering guitars and graceful piano. He’s bemoaning the loss of a relationship because of it, something that’s been a frequent theme in his past songs that gets a more plainspoken turn here. While that works just fine, and “Heartbreaking Bravery” is arguably one of the most beautiful songs Krug has ever put together, the more straightforward lyrics can sometimes be a double-edged sword. “Shitty City” is perhaps the best example of this, with the supremely bland chorus of, “It’s a shitty city now/It’s a shitty/city/now.’ That’s not exactly poetry.

There are a few moments on With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery that are truly excellent both lyrically and compositionally. “Quickfire, I Tried” swirls with carefully considered psychedelia, and “Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips” finds Krug trying to grasp onto shreds of hope amid the ruins of a relationship. In spite of the markedly darker overall mood of this record compared to just about anything else Krug has done with any of his many projects, what really helps make it special is the overall sense of maturity on display here. Not that his other, earlier work was childish and petty, but he’s never really sounded so adult and grounded before. The only unfortunate thing about it is that collaborating with Siinai on a record like this probably wasn’t the best decision to make. Both sides seem to be coming from different places at times, and the album suffers because of it. Still, it remains the best thing Krug has released under the Moonface name so far. Of course the bar was set pretty low there. As he continues to try new things and collaborate with new people, hopefully he’ll find others performing at his advanced and complicated level.

Moonface – Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips
Moonface – Headed for the Door

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Album Review: Moonface – Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped [Jagjaguwar]


Let’s take a brief overview of Spencer Krug’s musical history thus far. He first came to our attention courtesy of Wolf Parade, their debut album “Apologies to the Queen Mary” having gained enough hype and traction to earn coveted spots on plenty of year-end best of lists. Turns out he already had some irons in the musical fire though, working with Carey Mercer’s Frog Eyes for a bit, and also on some solo material under the name Sunset Rubdown. Krug would return to Frog Eyes for a brief period of time, but his more primary focus was to build Sunset Rubdown out into a full band in between Wolf Parade records. Once that task was completed, he then formed a supergroup with his friends Carey Mercer and Dan Bejar known as Swan Lake. So at this point it has reached 2006 and Spencer Krug is now officially a member of 4 different bands, not including the instrumental project called Fifths of Seven he put together back in 2005. Over the course of the last 6 years then, when you combine all those projects together, Krug has been a major part of 10 full length records and 3 EPs. If that doesn’t seem like a lot of music for one person to make, you’ve got a screw loose. The guy might as well be the new Robert Pollard. Anyways, Krug’s schedule has lightened up a bit these days, as he’s no longer working with Frog Eyes, Wolf Parade is on “indefinite hiatus” and Swan Lake is pretty much a big question mark.

Last year, Krug introduced a new, official solo project that he was calling Moonface. Unlike Sunset Rubdown, there are currently no plans to develop Moonface into something larger than just an outlet where Krug can mess around on his own terms. The debut Moonface released in 2010 was called “Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums”, and it consisted of a single 20 minute track that was exactly as the title described. It marked an interesting experiment in utilizing relatively unfamiliar instruments and trying to compose something of substance with a clear beginning, middle and end. Krug’s truth-telling titles continue with the first Moonface full length record, “Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped”. His original plan for the album was to make something more percussion-based, like the EP was, but with some vibraphone and a bit of guitar. The problem was that his attempts were not going well. So the thought eventually evolved into picking up an old double-manual organ and crafting some beautiful-sounding drone tracks with it. Nice though that may be, when you’re drawn to pop music, sometimes the catchy melody bug infects you and there’s no getting around it. Such was the case here, which explains why this record is relatively easy to like in spite of only having 5 total tracks, each lasting somewhere close to 7.5 minutes.

Every song starts with a loop. Often it’s a combination of beats and a few organ notes, all of which set the pace and provide a generous background melody to build off of. Sometimes those initial loops will disappear a short ways into the song to make room for other meandering bits or a different loop, but typically those same loops will pop up again towards the end of the song to bookend it nicely. The loops are more often than not the sole source of a hook on any individual track, even if Krug takes certain phrases and repeats them over and over and over again. On “Fast Peter”, he takes the lines “she’s the one/the one that he thinks of when he thinks of love” and repeats them a total of 4 times in a row, but there’s about 60 seconds of pure instrumental noodling in between each time. Even a line like “as she laid down the mountain” on the track “Shit-Hawk in the Snow”, which winds up being repeated 4 times in rapid succession, never comes up again later in the track. Slightly better are the lyrical moments that pop up at a few different points in the song, functioning much closer to a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure even if the rest of the song is far from traditional. “Loose Heart = Loose Plan” exhibits that courtesy of lines like “Talking Heads make me miss my friends/I’d like to see that face again”, though multiple paragraphs pass by before Krug gets around to the repeat. There’s also not a whole lot of sense to be made from most of these songs, the ultimate points obscured heavily by what appear to be random musings on life and nature and philosophy. Krug has always been a very strong songwriter, but there’s very little in the way of impressive word combinations on this record. Given that the majority of each song is instrumental and that he’s aiming for a hybrid of drone and pop, maybe lyrics were the last thing on his mind. Still, a song like “Fast Peter”, which is the rather brilliant centerpiece of the album, is also the one that makes the most sense story-wise, detailing a tough long-distance relationship.

What “Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped” ultimately has going for it is a rich collection of experimental tracks with a wider appeal than expected. The organ, which is essentially the only instrument used on the entire record, gets stretched to its limits in a number of ways, particularly because after 37 minutes of it the songs start to blend together. Once “Whale Song (Instead of a Kiss)” ends, “Fast Peter” coems in and for a few moments you almost believe it’s just going to be a sped-up version of what came before it, the starting and ending notes being so similar to one another. That turns out to not be the case, but it absolutely brings forth the suggestion that coming up with a good variety of songs was a challenge in itself. Krug reportedly wrote more than twice as many songs for this album, enough for a double album, but decided to cut half of them because they weren’t up to his standard of quality. What’s left is supposed to be the cream of the crop, and while he certainly meant well, what this record fails to equal are the great moments from virtually all of his past efforts with all of his past bands. To be perfectly clear, Spencer Krug is very much a musical genius and he has yet to turn in a genuinely bad album – this Moonface full length is about as bad as he gets, and even then that’s still pretty damn good. Plus, you’ve got to give the guy some degree of credit for consistently trying to push himself in new directions whether it suits him or not. To think that we could have gotten an entire record of vibraphone is actually a little scary at this point. The good news is that what we have gotten with the organ is listenable, at times beautiful, and may send your head spinning (that’s the drone part of it). Krug has said he plans to record a bunch more music before year’s end, Moonface one-time collaborations with friends that will likely be more of a return to the percussion-based sounds of “Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums”, but with a twist. Let’s hope whatever comes out of those sessions has more variety and intrigue than the slightly-above-average compositions that are “Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped”.

Moonface – Fast Peter

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