Best known as frontman with Sub Pop indie rockers Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug is widely celebrated for his restless creative spirit. Moonface seems to represent Krug’s desire to simultaneously peer above the commercial parapets and dig deeper into the art rock realm. Brimming with irresistible melodies and languorous, psychedelic arrangements, these songs shimmer and twinkle like surreal mirages in the night sky.
The hazily grandiose post-rock pulse of Finnish band Siinai provides the perfect counterfoil to their new leader’s faltering, anguished crooning.
In stark contrast to many of his indie peers, Krug imbues everything he does with a sense of sonic wonderment – witness the ripples of stuttering electronica that usher in Shitty City – but he is also a tirelessly succinct and impactful songwriter, unflagging in his ideas and permanently in thrall to the power of heartfelt simplicity, often via deliciously slow-motion metronomic krautrock.
The eerie amble of Faraway Lightning sounds like something Brian Eno and David Byrne might have put together in a moment of collective despair, this marriage of the fraught and the sensual bears beautiful, beguiling fruit.
