Moonface – Dreamland EP: marimba and shit-drums

I’m not ashamed of my love for Spencer Krug. Along with scant few others, he was among the genuine originals in indie music over the previous decade. With Wolf Parade, he made one of my top ten albums of the 00’s (though apparently no-one else’s) and y’know, that was a pretty damn good start, and then he went and did loads more awesome stuff with Swan Lake (‘All Fires’ is one of those songs that just never leaves you), Frog Eyes, and what is now his main project, Sunset Rubdown.So, a new project is always exciting, mainly because, unlike so many artists, a new project for Krug generally has a good reason behind it. Swan Lake has never felt like a place for Sunset Rubdown b-sides; the organic and sprawling sound of Sunset Rubdown clearly would never have sat well within the tight synth-pop of Wolf Parade. In many ways, Moonface is no different, though it’s definitely closer to Sunset Rubdown than anything else. Only, more fucking mental. This EP - or “song”, as some people might call it - consists of a single twenty-minute track, built using only the two titular instruments, with lyrics Krug claims were inspired by some clearly batshit insane dreams. The first two minutes consist of nothing but Krug’s voice and a marimba - some sort of xylophone thing, apparently - which is the only constant instrumentation through the whole piece, shit-drums drop in and out, and I’m not even sure what shit-drums are, unless they’re just badly constructed drums.The first thing about this is, the description alone should probably help make up your mind if you’re gonna like it. Twenty minutes of Spencer Krug dicking about with a marimba and some drums ends up being everything that it sounds like it could be, which to my mind is a brilliant and mysterious teaser for, well, hell knows what. To you it might sound like a kid with ADHD left alone in the school’s music suite. Which it kinda is too. Come back soon, Spencer.

Buy the EP from Amazon