Sunset Rubdown: "Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!"

On the awesome and awesomely titled Dragonslayer Spencer Krug sounds at once violable and volatile, his compositions looser but tougher, his art more insular but not Bejar. Here I pronounce Bejar’s name with harshness on the second syllable, as if it was translated from some mythic long-gone language of horse-people. Like reverse centaurs. Like a throat clearing sound. Because that weird horseman’s shadow looms larger and larger over Krug and the fantastic visions that plague him and the pastoral sweep of its accompanying music, and, guys, I don’t want Spencer Krug to turn into Dan Bejar.

As of this release, though, Krug remains one of the essential romantics of modern ennui. On the aching and achingly titled “Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!” the emotional rawness comes from repetition, rubbing the phrase, “You hunter, you hunter / Oh, you hunter,” into the listener until it achieves a swooning wound. The big difference between this and Krug’s previous efforts, though, is that here all this hammy melancholia is indulged fully (see: the album title), and rather than keeping the song’s weirdness caged in the band lets it roll for another two minutes after this keening climax, whimpering and warbling and carnivalesque. It is, at last, an assured and assuringly great song, redolent of all Krug’s artistic appeal but so full of itself that it teeters precipitously over the brink of self-parody and into the yawning, fiery chasm of (throat-clearing sound) Bejar, horseman. Steady, Krug.