A Bigger Kind of Kill

For years, I have soundtracked my life according to the season. Bands and albums become inextricably linked to particular phases and places; their sounds rocket me back to their corresponding moments whenever they enter my ears. Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP immediately conjures the vicious gray-and-black cycle of a colorless Providence winter, while The Decemberists' The Crane Wife recalls the autumn of my junior year of college, all yellowing skies, brisk throat-tingling breezes, and crisp autumn leaves descending in kamikaze spirals to find themselves beneath the shoes of frazzled students. So too this summer has found itself underscored by a recently-released album: Sunset Rubdown's magnificent Dragonslayer.

The brainchild of Wolf Parade's keyboardist and co-principal songwriter Spencer Krug, Sunset Rubdown began as a bedrom recording project and has matured into a full band with considerable live performance prowess. Characterized by what Filter magazine so accurately deemed "epic eccentricity," the band layers precise melodies and stately vocals over chugging rhythms and lush guitar- and piano-based orchestration. Their sound conveys a unique urgency especially appropriate for this summer, the first in my life clouded by a terrifying futurelessness, racing toward the first fall in five years to refuse promise of a return East. Listening to the layers of sound swirling beneath Krug's literate, grandiose lyrics produces the feeling I imagine I would experience upon standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and, in doing so, engenders a painful awareness of the need for proactivity in charting a path through a vast and overwhelming future.

Those lyrics, in fact, make this specific music-to-moment match particularly unique. Past seasonal soundtracks often achived their status through either sound or lyrical content, but never before Dragonslayer have those two characteristics converged so as to relate simultaneously and perfectly to a certain span of time. Krug is an unabashed symbolist, perhaps the purest in indie rock, and his narrators catalogue scads of fires, animals, mythic figures, virgins, and bodies of water in their complex-yet-direct, sometimes sprawling but always deft lines. Yet the apparent opacity of the lyrics does not totally obfuscate their accessibility, as Pitchfork's Jessica Suarez astutely observes in her review: "What seems like a pile of metaphors is just Krug simplifying the world. Actions are products of instinct or fate, always out of our control, easier to describe than understand. It's Krug's way of-- perhaps insufficiently-- interpreting the world without fully taming it." Indeed, Dragonslayer's comprehensibility eclipses that of the band's previous two LPs. Images and ideas recur from song to song, and while Dragonslayer is not a concept album (at least not to my knowledge), its progression of tracks forms a distinct thematic arc that charts a course from recklessness toward increased maturity.

But Dragonslayer is by no means a typical coming-of-age journey. Its lyrics distinguish it from the average maturation narrative in that the recognition of the need to grow up has already occurred before the album begins, infusing its early songs with the unique bittersweetness wrung from the tension between adulthood's required sophistication and youth's unbridled revelry. Opener "Silver Moons" begins with past tense -- "There were parties here in my honor;" "It was out of line but it was fun" -- as its narrator sets "off to the ballet, and to practice all these ancient ways," passing the torch to a new generation of night owls. His graduation to increased civility is not without sadness, however: "Hey, maybe these days are over, over now...And I loved it better than anyone else, you know." Second track "Idiot Heart" finds its narrator admonishing that "You can't settle down until the Icarus in your blood drowns;" when his audience fails to take his advice, he spits an ominous portent of forthcoming consequences: "I hope that you died in a decent pair of shoes: You've got a lot of long walking to do, where you're going to." Successive songs present images of fallen deities ("Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!"), ghosts and black swans and kingdoms ("Black Swan"), and transience versus permanence ("Paper Lace"), mapping a landscape of uncertainty and destruction that both frightens and beckons as Krug acknowledges the perverse allure of recklessness and devastation. Bursting with cataclysmic emotion, the heaving tide of these songs makes the listening process an overwhelming one, simultaneously fulfilling and draining (in an entirely positive sense). And the album has only reached its midpoint.

If Dragonslayer's first five songs represent recognition and reluctance to change, its final three usher in increased receptivity to the idea, and eventually reveal an eagerness to embrace it. Pivotal track "You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)" anchors the thematic transformation, as Krug shifts from participation to observation: "I would like to just follow you awhile. I'd like to watch the white flash of your heels as they take turns breaking the desert heat to beckon me in languages I've never learned." He also expresses the desire to abandon his performative role: "I'd like to throw this trumpet down and go on empty handed." His longing for removal from the fray becomes a wish for purification; he hopes to "appear before you virgin white if virgins are still chaste" and implies that the passage of time has distanced him from the mess he once craved. The song's final line -- "And if reflections on the water sometimes look like burning tears, we can watch them changing shape without pushing off the pier" -- confirms his urge to maintain that distance. All the while, the song's simple, soaring melodies reinforce its singer's attempt at increased wholesomeness.

Penultimate track "Nightengale/December Song" ratchets the purification factor up a level, describing rituals of spiritual cleansing that comprise bathing in mud and "swimming in a lake of holy water," while filtering these images through a lens of complementary personalities described in pyrotechnic terms: "You are a fast explosion and I am the embers." Danger still lingers beneath the narrator's increasingly mature surface, but it is conquerable and even beneficial when properly harnessed and cultivated. The album's sweeping conclusion, the epic "Dragon's Lair," continues this exploration, its lyrics signaling a heightened responsibility heretofore unseen. Direct connections to "Silver Moons" abound -- the same parties, confetti, and dead leaves feature prominently -- but the focus has shifted to the future. Having undergone a period of reflection, Krug is now prepared for bigger battles: "So you can take me to the dragon's lair, or you can take me to Rapunzel's windowsill. Either way, it is time for a bigger kind of kill." Youthful brazenness becomes heroic bravery, the destructive fire now channeled into a ferocious competitive spirit hell-bent on slaying monsters and seducing damsels. Yet the potential for decimation still remains, a fact highlighted by Krug's beguiling delivery. Aurally, "dragon's lair" and "dragonslayer" bear a strong resemblance, and Krug's hissing prolongation of the letter S makes the former sound curiously like the latter. It forms the album's most arresting moment, both lyrically and performatively -- with a slight vocal idiosyncrasy, Krug foregrounds the fine line between heroism (killing the dragon, saving the kingdom) and villainy (killing the dragonslayer, unleashing chaos), and closes the album with bone-chilling subversion.

All this overblown analysis, of course, is one person's completely speculative interpretation. Spencer Krug is an immensely talented songwriter whose notoriously mystifying lyrics lend themselves to a variety of explications, while only the writer himself knows the full extent of their meaning. Suffice it to say that in the face of excess time, this overactive imagination felt like putting an English major's twist on one of the summer's best albums. Who knows whether my ideas are remotely valid, but if any of the words or links above persuade you to explore Dragonslayer -- or, for that matter, its equally excellent predecessors, the blissfully quirky Random Spirit Lover and the gloriously sweeping Shut Up I Am Dreaming -- then this quagmire of an intellectual experiment will not have been in vain.