Sunset Rubdown

If it wasn’t for that coy little moustache and those helicopters always spinning around the dregs of stupid little civilizations, Spencer Krug would’ve been a figure of medieval madness for 2006, plague victim, postule-scratcher, under straw shirt and all. He’s romantic, and so then he’s unflinching with faith, his lyrics tending towards vague, personal Edens on the brink of tonsure. Love is sacred, belief is transfigurative while still instinctual, sacrifice is love, and so on, and such. Apocryphal colors dressed as normal colors swarm into the sky like terrible trinities; the wind fucking drowns out all doubt or protest because Krug acts like sin is unrelenting. And so is Sunset Rubdown, the EP especially, unrelenting I mean, it’s a brief causeway of pinpoint vision. Frankly, I’m intimidated by the guy. It’s hard to get a word in edgewise, all that lyrical tightness hard-pumping with the vitality of plain ole fucking abstraction, and how I end up vulgar and clumsy in comparison.

And just when you thought 2005 was the Year of Krug, Spencer fucks up his ordainment and puts out two fantastic albums preceded by a fantastic EP. And even if the self-titled snippet works as little more than a prelude to Shut Up I Am Dreaming, that gooey Golem of avant-ballads and mud, the five songs in attendance here develop a beautiful consistency, tiding the acoustic guitars and organs with archaic mood and invigorating each melody with skewed repetition. If I’m building a myth here, then Sunset Rubdown’s EP is a collection of psalms, odes, and barking beatitudes. If, in fact, our faith is vilified and Krug’s Holy See eventually dries up under the heat of hype, or of increasingly detrimental production, or of the intractable exhaustion of prolificacy, or of the guy’s sultry asexual reproduction obsolescing the need for modern mating, we’ll still have 2006. Until then, may this mummy of a man never find salvation.