Late last year, Wolf Parade announced that they were going on an "indefinite hiatus." What this actually means-- and whether or not it's a bit premature to talk of their "lifespan"-- is unclear, but fortunately, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug do not need each other to make good music. Last month Boeckner's electro-punk duo Handsome Furs released Sound Kapital, and it was undoubtedly the most impassioned record they've made yet. The prolific Krug, on the other hand, has been churning out interesting music for years with a variety of different projects, be it the eccentric supergroup Swan Lake or the increasingly ambitious one-time side project Sunset Rubdown. In a moment when many popular independent artists value accessibility, simplicity, and beach-ready blitheness above all else, Krug's continued appeal lies in the fact that he is an anachronism: a songwriter who's trying to squeeze Byzantine grandeur into the unlikely framework of indie rock. His catalogue is dense, charged with anxiety, and-- in a trick he may have picked up from Dan Bejar-- about as self-referential as a late-series episode of "Arrested Development".
Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, Krug's first post-Wolf Parade LP, feels like ritual music infused with 1980s nostalgia. Like his previous release as Moonface, a 20-minute marimba showcase appropriately subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums, Organ Music springs from Krug's experiments with a particular instrument. Over *Organ Music'*s five tracks (the shortest of which clocks in at six-and-half minutes), he creates what you might call Nintendo spirituals: songs that evoke his double-manual organ's devotional vibes just as much as they do-- through the use of drum machine beats, loops, and some skittish programming-- that song that plays throughout all the underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. These tracks are meditative, hypnotic, and born of Krug's unmistakable infatuation with the organ's brooding drone. I saw him perform the record live, and whenever he stopped singing he looked completely lost in his own reverie. Which, ultimately, is precisely the problem with this record.
Sunset Rubdown's last album, Dragonslayer, found Krug doing something that his critics didn't think he had in him: self-editing. It remains Krug's most impressive work to date because it's as accessible and immediate as it is thematically complex. Sure, there are dragons, muses, and forays into the Icarus Rhyming Dictionary, but there are also pummeling riffs and catchy hooks galore. Perhaps Dragonslayer's greatest and most unexpected triumph, though, was how emotionally relatable it was. It was a personal record about the toll that the worlds inside someone's head takes on his relationships.
Organ Music, on the other hand, is more of an exercise in shadowboxing. Here, the music drones on without creating an inhabitable atmosphere, and most of its melodies are flat and uninviting. Even when Krug explores Organ Music's more interesting lyrical terrain, it often feels like an echo of something he's done better in the past. The opening verse of "Whale Song (Instead of a Kiss)", for example, feels like a retread of Wolf Parade's "Grounds for Divorce", but with less of a blunt impact.
Which isn't to say it's all tedium. The opener "Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor" is absorbing and showcases a wide array of the titular instrument's moods. And the standout track is "Fast Peter", a charming tale of recreational drug use and long-distance Internet love with a frenetic tempo and a weirdly compelling 8-bit Peer Gynt vibe. These two songs combined are about as long as Marimba and Shit-Drums; they might have made a good EP.
Organ Music's press release has been floating around the Internet for some time now. It was written by Krug himself, and it is magnificently bizarre and fittingly meta. In it, he hints at knowing that this release is more than a little self-indulgent. He tells us the record was twice as long before he cut five tracks; "You're welcome," he adds. He also seems to wink at the inevitability that we will compare it to the high-water marks of his career. "Moonface will probably never sound like Wolf Parade or Sunset Rubdown," he says, and he's not wrong. Organ Music isn't reaching for any brass rings, so it's hard to fault it too hard for not being a highlight of his career when it never tries to be one. And Krug fans who can't get behind this particular side of him shouldn't get too bent out of shape; his back catalogue shows that something completely different could be around the next corner.
