Sunset Rubdown
October 26th at Great American Music Hall

Sunset Rubdown may have sprung from the fertile well that is Wolf Parade in the mid-2000s, but Spencer Krugs’ “side project” should not be relegated as such. The bombastic sound that overtook the Great American Music Hall on Monday night was testament to his work as a unique songwriting force in his own right. Krug has a truly singular vision. When he isn’t sharing directorial duties, as he does with Wolf Parade co-frontman Dan Boeckner (who himself heads lo-fi synth-rock outfit Handsome Furs) to fit within that group’s more urgent, fractured sound, his compositions are vast in scope and ambitiously penned, sprawling and loose and oblique. These songs are just as grand when delivered in a live capacity as they are when captured so purposefully on record. The music is steeped in deep minutiae, with nuances like a blaring trumpet crashing alongside a vigorous dual drum sequence, or brisk vocal harmonies that coincide with a quickening tempo—all intimate and intricate details that shape disparate elements into opuses, at times both epic and surprisingly approachable.

Sunset Rubdown is one of my favorite bands. I very much like most everything they’ve released. I find it challenging but exceptionally rewarding music. The whole of their third release, Random Spirit Lover, baffled and alienated me until it suddenly, unexpectedly, turned on its heel and became one of my favorite records of ’07. I think I’d probably find Krugs’ melodramatic vocal totally annoying if it was driving compositions any less majestic, but within that wide-open framework, it’s the perfect vehicle to escort songs to their softly whimpering or suspenseful, theatrical ends. The storybook setting of his lyrics lend themselves to pomp and circumstance, circumventing standard song formula and rock ‘n’ roll’s conventional terseness to run far and wide into terrain yet unexplored within faraway kingdoms, full of mystical creatures, ideas, and ambitions. It’s self-indulgent as hell, sure. Krug’s music is profoundly insular, but he wraps personal ideologies and his own self-awareness in metaphor and serves it up as layered, uncompromising tracks born of his mind alone.

Krug plays keyboard and guitar, and commands the band that falls in perfect sequence behind him. A few songs dramatically employ two personally synced drummers on two separate drum kits. Camilla Wynne Ingr (of Montreal girl group Pony Up!) plays a number of roles, including hand percussion and synth, as well as offers her pretty lilting vocal to harmonize on some of the tracks. Sunset Rubdown, on tour to promote their newest album Dragonslayer, played many songs from that record, of course, but closed with the most beautiful version of “Us Ones in Between” off their sophomore LP, 2006’s Shut Up I am Dreaming, a song that lit me up all along my senses: “You are a waterfall / Waiting inside a well / You are a wrecking ball / Before the building fell / And every lightning rod / Has got to watch the storm cloud come.”

Watch: Sunset Rubdown, “Us Ones In Between” [at youtube.com]

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