DownTuned

Sunset Rubdown are a confusing prospect. Where a good rock band will make you wait an age – all the way till the finale – before they deign to make that riff you’ve been hearing in your head throughout manifest itself, Sunset Rubdown will throw it in after five seconds. They’ll then become bored and crash, far too early on, into one of three separate and distinct choruses before unsettling you with what you thought was a coda before it just happened, carelessly, to morph into a new version of the first verse. They’re a dazzlingly fidgety bunch.

Unlike Wolf Parade, the more conventional of leader Spencer Krug’s trio of ongoing projects, Sunset Rubdown appear to lack any of the cool self-consciousness that comes from being the product of a joint venture. Considering Krug uses his more personal outing to sing about dragons, moons, kings, dreamweavers, wizards and trumpeters with what can only be described as a melodramatic lo fi bent, it must be hard for him to even conceive playing it cool when the listenership is more likely the Dungeons & Dragons school collective than the cool kids at University. If that sounds like a criticism, it’s not, because like Krug’s the last project in his triptych – Swan Lake – Sunset Rubdown are far more focused on the process of invention than they are post-production. Slickness is an alien concept here, whilst the crystallisation of the idea is key. Sunset Rubdown capture the moment when one sound molecule first hits another better than any other band I can think of.

Listening to their second album, Random Spirit Lover, can be a gruesome experience, as it sometimes sounds like it was recorded by a very focused drunk. Production values were seemingly pushed right down on the priority agenda and amazingly the record is still accessible – the ideas so beautifully realised that it doesn’t matter when the epic moments become overly swamped in peripheral instrumentation. The ideas still manage to leap out at you from the mess.

Preceding that, their first record Shut Up I Am Dreaming sounded more like a bedroom recording than a band effort – and carried all the pros and cons that comes with the territory. The shambling and lonely lo fi charm it captured were often offset by tapeheads smothered in just a little too much dust – but if you like that kind of thing, it was an enthralling debut.

I’m curious to know how those coming to the band fresh, listening to new release Dragonslayer as their first taste of the band will feel about it when they hear it. It’s not an easy set of sounds on the ear first time round. Opener Silver Moons begins proceedings in a deceptively restrained way, but soon the respectable piano gives way to the bombast and pomp the band use to teeter their songs on the precipice between outright silliness and remarkable audacity. ‘I’m off to the ballet!’ bawls Krug in a line so bizarre it makes your ears twitch in a song so odd it sounds like The Fall mangling Meat Loaf – and somehow it still sounds great.

The first time I heard You Go On Ahead with all its talk of chaste virgins and buttefly wings was in its Youtubed, live and acoustic form. On the new album, it’s a scratchy, violent monster of a song, emerging like a fire from a swamp – all angry and covered in muck. The nearest thing to a single on the album, I dread to think how it’s going to go down at indie discos as this new, souped up version always makes me feel gleefully violent – even on the third listen of the day.

Later on, Paper Lace appears – a song Krug previously recorded more languidly with the more ponderous and reverby Swan Lake, but here it’s been injected with an elegant urgency. Black Swan is a nursery rhyme accompanied by a faltering, feedback-heavy and waterlogged amp and Idiot Heart begins its time with daunting guitars and lyrical warnings before transforming into a resigned and spiteful chant, accompanied by keyboard-player Camilla Wynne’s butter-wouldn’t-melt vocal – a trick used throughout the album to sugar the pill.

These are the standout moments in the first Sunset Rubdown album that works as a whole. And whilst it’s a coherent whole, the obtuse idiosyncracies within make it familiarly disconcerting, warmly disorientating and appreciably uncooperative – which is just the way the fans will want it. Sunset Rubdown have matured, but you can forget about them ever growing up, rooted as they are in childhood daydreaming and the innocent pleasures of rage and giddy excitement.

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