Band of the Week: Sunset Rubdown

Hometown: Montreal, Quebec
Fun Fact: Despite overblown speculation to the contrary, frontman Spencer Krug, whose other projects include Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes and Swan Lake, does have leisure time – his favorite activities include tennis and archery, neither of which he purports to be any good at.
Why It's Worth Watching: On Sunset Rubdown's third album, Random Spirit Lover, overachiever Spencer Krug and his bandmates free themselves from pigeonholing by establishing the band's unique merits through purposeful meanderings and passionate crescendos.
For Fans Of: The Fiery Furnaces, Xiu Xiu, Modest Mouse

Unbridled blog-hype conflicts itself when it eagerly likens the prolific young indie icon Spencer Krug to elders of productivity Robert Pollard and David Byrne while simultaneously applying the diminishing “side project” label amidst the varied band involvement that made the yawping singer’s work ethic noteworthy in the first place.

The term seemingly assumes that Krug maintains some kind of multi-tiered organizational system of music creation, in which anything beyond the relatively lucrative business of Wolf Parade is attended to as a leisurely shits-and-giggles afterthought. But if popularity alone drives the main-thing designation, Krug’s more cathartic and cerebral band, Sunset Rubdown, is catching up to the pack – last month, the Montreal-based group’s third album, Random Spirit Lover, reached No. 1 on Canada’s Top 50 Campus Radio chart.

Speaking in a reserved, sleepy-sounding voice entirely unlike the trembling severity of his singing style, Krug clarifies to Paste that Sunset Rubdown involves more intimate focus than Wolf Parade, which he semi-jokingly categorizes as house-party music. “Wolf Parade’s a rock band; it’s really fun to play live,” he says. “But Sunset is where I put things that are closer to the heart, things I want to take a lot of time and care with.”

Originally, Krug conceived the sensually surreal moniker for anything uniquely “rule-less,” first utilizing it to make the laptop-in-the bedroom low-fi of 2005’s Snake’s Got A Leg. “I don’t consider the first record anything to consider, really,” Krug says of the group’s technical debut, inconsistently pieced together by the frontman before there was anyone else involved to be fronted. “It’s not that great, musically. I consider the last record (2006's Shut Up I Am Dreaming) the first one, when we started as a band. [Snake’s Got A Leg] really is an odd duck.”

Still, critics sometimes incorrectly peg Sunset Rubdown as a solo endeavor – despite its consistent lineup (Camilla Wynn Ingr of Pony Up!, Jordon Robson-Cramer of Magic Weapon and Michael Doerksen). Structurally, lyrically and harmonically, Krug said he still calls the shots, but stresses that it’s not a one-man operation. “These guys do things to the songs I would never think of,” he says. “They add these flourishes and aesthetic brushstrokes that never would have occurred to me.”

Speaking for the rest of the band, Ingr agreed that they are not live-show lackeys, responding to Krug’s madman whims. “I read an interview where someone called him a dictator,” Ingr laughs. “The press makes it sound like he’s this enterprising young man who’s purposely going out to create some kind of empire of discography. I don’t think he exactly means to do all of that.”

A former composition major at Concordia University, Krug is at least getting plenty of mileage from his formal education. Random Spirit Lover’s “Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days” is a stiff baroque march-turned-unhinged carnival ride with a glorious peak that sounds like 17th century heralds discarding their trumpets in favor of triumphant guitar noodling.

“I think, melodically, I’m still quite a music dork,” Krug says, adding that Sunset Rubdown could set itself apart as a better medium for complex instrumental geekery. “I know there are definitely Sunset Rubdown fans that don’t have time for Wolf Parade,” he adds. “Maybe it’s not nerdy enough.”

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