Send "Moonface " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Late last year, Wolf Parade announced that they were going on an "indefinite hiatus." What this actually means-- and whether or not it's a bit premature to talk of their "lifespan"-- is unclear, but fortunately, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug do not need each other to make good music. Last month Boeckner's electro-punk duo Handsome Furs released Sound Kapital, and it was undoubtedly the most impassioned record they've made yet. The prolific Krug, on the other hand, has been churning out interesting music for years with a variety of different projects, be it the eccentric supergroup Swan Lake or the increasingly ambitious one-time side project Sunset Rubdown. In a moment when many popular independent artists value accessibility, simplicity, and beach-ready blitheness above all else, Krug's continued appeal lies in the fact that he is an anachronism: a songwriter who's trying to squeeze Byzantine grandeur into the unlikely framework of indie rock. His catalogue is dense, charged with anxiety, and-- in a trick he may have picked up from Dan Bejar-- about a self-referential as a late-series episode of "Arrested Development".Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, Krug's first post-Wolf Parade LP, feels like ritual music infused with 1980s nostalgia. Like his previous release as Moonface, a 20-minute marimba showcase appropriately subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums, Organ Music springs from Krug's experiments with a particular instrument. Over Organ Music's five tracks (the shortest of which clocks in at six-and-half minutes), he creates what you might call Nintendo spirituals: songs that evoke his double-manual organ's devotional vibes just as much as they do-- through the use of drum machine beats, loops, and some skittish programming-- that song that plays throughout all the underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. These tracks are meditative, hypnotic, and born of Krug's unmistakable infatuation with the organ's brooding drone. I saw him perform the record live, and whenever he stopped singing he looked completely lost in his own reverie. Which, ultimately, is precisely the problem with this record. Sunset Rubdown's last album, Dragonslayer, found Krug doing something that his critics didn't think he had in him: self-editing. It remains Krug's most impressive work to date because it's as accessible and immediate as it is thematically complex. Sure, there are dragons, muses, and forays into the Icarus Rhyming Dictionary, but there are also pummeling riffs and catchy hooks galore. Perhaps Dragonslayer's greatest and most unexpected triumph, though, was how emotionally relatable it was. It was a personal record about the toll that the worlds inside someone's head takes on his relationships....full text |
| Jagjaguwar |
| Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped CD / LP (JAG168, released: 08/02/11) Today is my birthday. I am getting up there. Maybe one day I will be full-old, not just half-old like I am now, and tour around as "Spencer Krug," playing ancient Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown songs on a baby grand. I'll have a tumbler glass of whisky and an ashtray and a nice jacket. It will be terrible. But until that day arrives I will go instead by "Moonface" - the last moniker I have left to exploit. Moonface is not a band, just plain half-old me, in any solo or collaborative projects I'm involved in from now until whenever. In early 2010 the first EP was released on Jagjaguwar. It was called Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums, and sounds as the title suggests. This past winter, trying to keep sane in my snowed-in Montreal home, I recorded another solo record. This new one is an LP called Organ Music not Vibraphone like I'd Hoped and is due out August 2nd, 2011. At first this record was going to be another percussion album, not completely unlike the Dreamland EP, done with a vibraphone and some sparse guitar, extra percussion, what have you. But it wasn't happenening. I don't know why. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. Then, one night, laying awake and thinking about music, I suddenly wanted to play an old double-manual organ - the kind from the 80s that you find in your grandmother's basement. I would procure such an organ, hook it up to big whirling speakers and powerful amplifiers, and make a long, drone-filled, lush and noisy album of intense volume and beauty and poeticism. This was the new plan. Half of it happened. I found the organ, bought it up, plugged it into big whirling speakers and powerful amplifiers, and got down to making some lush drones. But the lush drones did not come. You see, I have a little dude who lives inside me that loves pop music, and he sometimes finds his way into my hands. When this happens, my fingers move toward the catchiest melodies they can, like bees to flowers with the most pollen. It can't be helped. The little pop-dude inside me turns a few notes into a melody and I say, "Okay, that's nice little dude, a little poppy maybe, but nice, maybe we can use that once, somewhere in the song." And he says, "But wouldn't you rather hear it over and over again? Maybe throw it in a few times now, and then a few times again towards the end of the song? And maybe that 'drone' in your left hand would sound better if you moved it up and down the keyboard a little bit." But then I say, "Come on little dude, I'm no fool, that's just a chord progression you're trying to get out of me. Next thing you know we'll be repeating it over and over again, the melody will be a hook, and I'll have made another random half-pop song." And then the little dude says, "WTF, man." And then I say, "Okay little dude, okay, party on."...full text |
| Avclub |
| Halfway through “Loose Heart = Loose Plan,” the final track on Moonface’s debut Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped, the singer asks, “You wanna sing like me?” Actually, no one else sings like Moonface’s leader, the prolific Spencer Krug. His hypersensitive voice is strangled and cramped, the midpoint of a warble and a bleat that’s instantly recognizable in his work with half a dozen bands, most famously Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped not only bears Krug’s distinctive voice, but almost all of the traits that have come to define his output. It is an intriguing if occasionally slight recapitulation of Krug’s chief strengths. The songs on Organ Music are seven- and eight-minute escapades that turn and tumble a particular topic over and over again, with drum machines pattering beneath stacks of keyboards and loops. The lyrics are the sort of elliptical tangents that demand to be pealed back line by line. “Fast Peter” is more than a look at a friend who’s trying to learn how to love; it’s a suggestion that technology has exacerbated our grass-is-greener mentality, turning escapism into an international affair. “Whale Song (Song Instead Of A Kiss)” traces similar lines, with Krug offering a reexamination of the artiste as someone who’s afraid to act on or articulate feelings. Instead, they spout images and ellipses, feigning meaning to avoid truth. The truths on Organ Music are captivating enough; it’s just too bad there aren’t more of them....full text |
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