Earlier this year, Spencer Krug revived “I’ll Believe in Anything,” a 20-year-old classic by his former band Wolf Parade. He noted on Instagram that he’d tinkered with a solo piano version for years, but this, at last, was the one he felt he could stand behind. The breakthrough arrived shortly after the original song went viral from a needle-drop placement in the TV series Heated Rivalry, which drove new interest toward Krug’s catalog—a deep, murky place that includes Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, and his solo albums.
“I’ll Believe in Anything” was a streamlined forerunner of the stomp-clap era, and Krug delivers it clean, working it from lacy beginnings to a gently swinging ending. It’s a rare case of the Canadian musician aiming for mass appeal. It’s fun to imagine people falling into his arcane world through an accessible portal. His new album makes no concessions to curious newcomers: This is undiluted Krug, the unsettling sound of being stuck in your head.
Like most of his recent LPs, Same Fangs was culled from Krug’s Patreon subscription series, a format befitting the rarified tastes of indie-rock truffle hunters and ortolan eaters. He was always considered the weird one in Wolf Parade. Dan Boeckner brought the meat and potatoes; Krug showed up with a pasta made of broken clocks and inscrutable sauce. On his own, he hits like a PG-13 Xiu Xiu, choking out ballads of beauty and brokenness over destroyed piano chords. Or a less shampooed Dan Bejar, with more severe strains of Scott Walker.
Harmonically, Krug likes to describe wary circles around a simple tonal center, a couple of chords revolving through an outward-spinning cosmos. Picture rock as a dark and desolate place, shot through with tentative light. His songs seem sharply composed at the line level yet blurred overall, their outlines diffuse—the melodies go where he needs them to go, and the lyrics follow. He uses his lovely voice in a creepy way, something a little sick in the vibrato, tinting abstract lyrics with sinister suggestions.
Yet Krug can also be a goofball with tongue firmly in cheek; he enjoys sticking cuss words and bad puns in elevated places. Same Fangs has finely hewn couplets like “There is a red wall of confusion/And it’s a hundred liars high,” from standout “Real Long Headlock,” its groovy palpitations tugged down by a stuck piano note. But these cut gems tumble in fourth wall–smashing torrents like “And I’m fuckin freakin’ out/Because I am middle-aged and thick-necked now,” from the same song. Then there’s “List of Names,” which punctures its own chamber-music pomp with lyrics about Tweedledee and Tweedledum and the groaner, “But you're the Ursa who made me feel the Minor-est of them all.”
Same Fangs isn’t just Patreon cruft—rather, Krug spent a week re-recording these picks with collaborators. Though the songs cling close to his piano and voice, they’re lent variety by strings from Maria Grigoryeva, guitar and additional drums from Jordan Koop, and vocals from Elbow Kiss. But what are the songs about? Most overtly, they’re about songs. The album is meta from the jump, when the pretty piano etude “Get to Live” is intercut with what sound like editorial voice memos. The moving opening lyrics return, on the country-frilled “Souvenirs,” to close the album, bending it into a recursive circle.
But this holistic conception is webbed with cracks and trapdoors. “Listening to Music in Cars 2.5 (All the Tired Horses)” is about Krug trying to write a song called “Listening to Music in Cars,” about touring with Sunset Rubdown. But it sucked, so he wrote another song—“Timebomb,” which appears on Same Fangs in hesitating waves of crushed chords—about it sucking, then went back to finish the failed song. “I still loved those two sets of chords,” goes his extended sprechstimme in “Listening to Music.” “They’re like the right and left branches of the same set of horns.” He says that he took them from a Sunset Rubdown song, “The Mending of the Gown,” and tells the story of how a Bob Dylan line got into the mix.
There’s something almost Swiftian—this one, not that one—about all this navel-gazing, or perhaps it’s like a bad dream descending on the unicorn-doodled candy land of Jens Lekman. Go deep enough and songs about real life necessarily include the writing of songs. Even the self-referential songs have a deeper emotional valence, hinting at decaying friendships, but their topicality takes up outsize conceptual space because you often don’t know what the hell Krug is singing about. Still, he has a striking way of not saying. Wolf Parade, and to an extent Sunset Rubdown, were about some kind of outsider communion. But this music is truly alone, lost in whirring thought. It pours back and forth in the echo chamber between life and art, transferring mysterious traces.
