So you say it’s the hair of ghosts - Sunset Rubdown

I’m having a creative lull at the moment, and I haven’t blogged here in a while, so I’m going to take advantage of this little platform to get some essay rest and try hard to make more people love one of my favourite bands. Isn’t that what it’s all about? So here we go.

I had a nice morning this morning. I woke up really early (relatively speaking - I am a student and it is still Easter holidays) and ended up walking from Heuston Station down the quays into college. The air was fresh, the morning was buzzing and the gypsies were rude. These are the moments mp3 players are made for. So I drew my ageing Zen from my pocket, begged it not to crash again and got my scrolling thumb ready to go through a hundred and fifty bands ten times before finding something. But I was in a certain type of mood, so I went for Sunset Rubdown.

I will always love Wolf Parade, even if they never actually get the second album made, because they were the first 18s gig I ever saw (with a terrible fake ID) and I like Swan Lake, whose best songs are by Spencer anyway, a lot too.

But I still get the feeling that Spencer Krug’s real creative efforts, where he truly lets fly with everything he’s got, are in Sunset Rubdown. You can tell by listening to what he does with other people. Swan Lake is reasonably restrained stuff, even though his songs are really good. It’s a definitive side-project thing. And Wolf Parade, even though it broke him and Handsome Dan into the indie version of the mainstream, seems to stifle the tangential, image-laden, ADD quality in his songwriting and distill it into something approaching regular “rock”. That puts me off.

Random Spirit Lover came out around the middle of last year, but I didn’t get around to listening to it until December, and even though I don’t really believe in “growers”, it took another month again for it to strike me how brilliant it is. It’s hard to come to grips with it at points because it’s so dense. Between Spencer’s organ and piano (and sometimes both at the same time) and the snakey guitar lines, the unschooled drumming, the mysterious female backing vocals and the desperate, wordy lead vocals, there is always a melody somewhere trying to edge another one out. The pace quickens and slackens between songs, and even though everyone does it nowawadays, the way they go from quiet to loud and back can really get to you.

Lyrically (sorry Darragh), it’s really, genuinely great stuff. It’s like reading a Russian novel on top of incredibly dense keyboard-driven indie music. Except it’s not. The images are thrown on thick and fast. People are animals very often, God and religion shows up centrally and in cameo roles, people argue over whether things are just smoke or in fact Poseidon’s beard… and it’s never a tongue in cheek thing.

Some people seem to like the previous album, Shut Up I Am Dreaming, better. While that is also an incredibly good album, I have a feeling they’re not giving enough time to Random Spirit Lover. Either that or they have got ear wax backed up in their ears and need a syringing. Maybe. It’s possible.

They’re playing here on the 20th May, the same night as Broken Social Scene. But seriously, how is that even a decision?

Here is a video of them live (there are no speakers where I am so I have no idea how this sounds, but I wanted to use a video of a song off the new album and the YouTube comments said the audio quality is good - so it must be, right? I’ll change it later if not.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRCrjEja8yU]