Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like Id Hoped

The one-song, twenty-minute debut by Spencer Krug’s Moonface (*Dreamland EP: Marimba and S\*\*t-Drums*) promised a new frontier for the Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown musician: Krug’s shaman-meets-cryptographer blend of bony drums and mystical marimbas interwoven with African tones and hippie wonderment (“I am a moonfaced flower child, I am”) was hypnotic and intriguing. On his sophomore release, *Organ Music Not Vibraphone*, Krug traded the marimbas for vibraphones, but he chucked it all after a false start and instead went with an oscillating, looping vintage organ and drum machines. Tracks averaging seven minutes in length burble and bleep and burp, pop melodies struggling to burst out of the Steve Reich-ian patterns that twist and turn like Escher mazes, eschewing easy choruses and sensible bridges. Aiming for “something between pop and lush drones,” Krug nails it: the eerie beauty of tracks like “Fast Peter” and “Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor,” the dance-floor menace of “Sh\*\* Hawk In the Snow” and the melancholy charm of “Whale Song “ are utterly captivating.

Spencer Krug's project away from Sunset Rubdown and the on-hiatus Wolf Parade continues to obsess over the properties of specific instruments.

Halfway through “Loose Heart = Loose Plan,” the final track on Moonface’s debut Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped, the singer asks, “You wanna sing like me?” Actually, no one else sings like Moonface’s leader, the prolific Spencer Krug. His hypersensitive voice is strangled and cramped, the midpoint of a…

There’s a pretty decent chance that if you find yourself questioning whether or not a rabidly bleeping and organ-driven…

When does Spencer Krug have time to grocery shop? During downtime between Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, the gatherer of no moss is back with his second installment as Moonface.

Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug continues his synthesiser-based solo project – it's sketchy, but has a strange beauty, writes <strong>Dave Simpson</strong>