079: Sunset Rubdown - Cliché Town
In all honesty I've been reluctant to listen to the new Sunset Rubdown material. For those that aren't aware, Sunset Rubdown is one of the many projects of Spencer Krug alongside Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes, Moonface, and a few others. As voices go, as artistic visions go, there's been few to match the output and relentless quality of Krug over the past couple of decades and he's played a firm and often beautiful hand in so many of my most-cherished songs and albums, in whatever form he funnels them through.
I discovered Sunset Rubdown off the back of Wolf Parade's all-timer of a debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, a record that remains one of indie-rock's strongest collections from that now-faded era. It was staggering to witness; Sunset Rubdown – the more fantastical art-rock beast to Wolf Parade's peculiar beauty – somehow releasing both the Shut Up I Am Dreaming LP (2006) and Random Spirit Lover LP (2007) in the couple of years between Wolf Parade's first two records, barely a breath to spare, barely a single shade or colour that was thrown at the glorious wall of noisy glamour.
And it was all so good. Spiralling, endlessly inventive, joyously weird rock epics that shook you out of this world and deep into some other realm where the weirdo kids ruled. Where the lyrics were bountiful and bizarre, but always wild and willing enough to be scribbled into notebooks, screamed into the wind:
No, I was never much of a dancer
But I know enough to know you've got to move your idiot body around
And you can't, can't settle down
Until the idiot in your blood settles down
(Idiot Heart 2009)
The quartet – Krug plus Camilla Wynne, Michael Doerksen, and Jordan Robson-Cramer – followed it all up with Dragonslayer, another eminently eccentric odyssey in 2009, played 50 live shows around the world, and quickly disbanded, in a haze of outlandish dry-ice and the dizzying memory of it all.
Until, that is, the band re-grouped for a string of shows across of Canada and the USA in 2023, ending their fourteen-year hiatus and setting hearts a flutter (with Nicholas Merz replacing Michael Doerksen from the original line-up). Then came the news so many had hoped for, the band announcing their first new material since that 2009 farewell, a fifteen-year gap brought to a close with the proposed release of Always Happy to Explode this coming September.
And that's when the apprehension kicked-in. What if, after all this time, in this version of this life, it just didn't connect? They were always such a wild, untamed beast that their music became something of a mystical legend unto itself; a dream you can remember all the details of but can't ever revisit.
But what is life if not for living? So I sat down in my favourite chair. waited for the day to start slipping away, and filled my house with the sound of new single 'Cliché Town'. Sweet, sweet relief, to not only find it still resonated, but for that resonance to stir memory and nostalgia and giddy elation. The sound of something bigger than today, bigger than these walls. The sound of hearts and drums colliding and forcing a crack through the clouds. It's good to know it's still there; what lies beyond.
"Gone are the days bonfires make me think of you," they sang all those years ago.
Aren't they just, aren't they just.
~
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