Sunset Rubdown
Random Spirit Lover

THE REVIEW

Concise and direct review. (Meaning: Sunset Rubdown are influenced by. No more, no less.)

(10% Animal Collective + 7% Bowie + 9% Spoon) + (They Might Be Giants x Modest Mouse) x (Flaming Lips + Arcade Fire)^3 = Sunset Rubdown

In other words:

Random Spirit Lover = Glam + Dream Pop + Experimental + Psychedelia + Avant + Indie Rock + Lo Fi 

Explanation. (Meaning: the actual review.)

Sunset whaaa???

If I mention Frog Eyes, perhaps we start to understand each other better.

Now let's throw Wolf Parade into the mix. Starting to get the picture? Well, let me proceed by discussing the delirious 60 minutes of this weighty (in terms of heaviness, mind you) album.

Sunset Rubdown and the aforementioned groups, besides being all three Canadian and strictly niche bands, share another common element, which is a hyper-productive keyboardist/singer/songwriter, also known as Spencer Krug, who in this case is the undisputed leader of the project.

Camilla Wynn Ingr, Jordan Robson Cramer, Michael Doerksen, and Krug blend the Psych and Dream Pop of Flaming Lips with avant-garde creativity, lightened up by Indie Rock patches, into 12 feverish, noisy, and fluctuating tracks.

On one side, there are nursery rhymes, circusy atmospheres, carnival marches, and bursts of bouncing notes (The Mending Of The Gown, Up On Your Leopard, Upon The End Of Your Feral Days, The Courtesan Has Sung, The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life), on the other, the slower and denser episodes, sometimes with a vaguely baroque flavor (Magic Vs. Midas, Winged/Wicked Things, Stallion, For The Pier, Trumpet, Trumpet, Toot! Toot!).

Disjointed phrases and melodies, dreamy riffs, celestial climaxes, and patches of music that seem randomly placed but, after endless spins and various convolutions, manage to return to the chorus and pick up the thread again. 

Random Spirit Lover. Meaning: how to line up surreal naivety and Arcade Fire theatrics while Krug, with his psychotic, emotional, and trembling voice, paints colors too intense to be fully absorbed after just one superficial listen.

Pure soft chaos.

Random review. (Meaning: what Sunset Rubdown evokes, strictly in no particular order.) 

The scent of pancakes.

The taste of cotton candy.

An album to get lost in, among abandoned rides, sunset amusement parks, unearthed old toys, afternoons in the attic, colored balloons, a pinwheel in the chubby hand of a child, improbable tangles of pastel-tinted yarn, detours and alternatives, and noses in the air watching the clouds.

Random Spirit Lover means landing in one of the parallel worlds built by the notes and the genius mind of Krug and daydreaming about what the next triumph of rainbows, rising riffs, and clattering black and white keys will sound like.