Moonface: "Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips"

It’s funny how Spencer Krug always seems to catch up with himself. He casts aside one avatar for another, ducks behind an ever-expanding constellation of creative identities, and the result is somehow that he just sounds more like Spencer Krug. It’s a trick he might’ve learned from friend and frequent collaborator Dan Bejar, another songwriter whose authorial distinctiveness is such that he can create records as radically different as Streethawk: A Seduction (2001) and Kaputt (2011) without forgoing that singular identity. The trick—and what has kept both of these songwriters relevant well past their initial breakout successes—is to change along with the disguise; restrict yourself to one instrument or one template, like Krug has on recent projects, and you find in those constraints the flame of freedom, of free creation, kindled anew.

The sacrifice, if one wants to see it that way, is that fan expectations essentially fall by the wayside. Last year’s excellent and underrated Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped was, among other things, Krug dealing with this dilemma directly by cutting himself off from his own creations: we might “make a garden from the flowers growing out of [his] remains,” as he told us there, but that’s none of his business one way or the other—he’s already moved on, as it were, to the next life. So here that is: the second iteration of the explicitly protean Moonface project, which finds Krug coming out of his cave by the sea and consorting with us mortals once again. To be released by Jagjaguwar on April 17, Heartbreaking Bravery was recorded with Finnish band Siinai apparently acting more or less as Krug’s backing band, and this first single is a surprisingly upbeat rocker that….wait, what? Palm-muted guitars? Anthemic synth cascades? “Teary eyes and bloody lips make you look like Stevie Nicks”?

If these were pretty much the last things you expected to hear on the second Moonface full-length, you’re not alone. It was precisely this vein of mid-tempo, guitar-driven rock that Krug sounded increasingly tired of peddling by the time Expo 86 (2010) came out and Wolf Parade dissolved, and that he seemed to be turning away from with the experiments of the first two Moonface releases. Nevertheless, the rock is very much back in the man’s veins, and it sounds fantastic. “Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips” is the most succinct and effective song Krug’s given us since Dragonslayer (2009), at least; in a little over two minutes, it delivers more pop sugar than anything he’s been involved with since At Mount Zoomer (2008).

As a fan of everything the man’s done, I don’t make these claims lightly, and I’m betting that even Krug skeptics will be won over by the exuberance evident in the band’s playing here. I don’t know what spurred this return to guitars and pop songwriting—whether it was just the new band and environment, or something that transpired in the time since Krug effectively turned his back on popular preconceptions a few years back—but for the time being, I don’t really care. I’m happy enough to have this song, and to be able to look forward to what else Heartbreaking Bravery might have to offer.