This One's for the Dancer & This One's for the Dancer's Bouquet

Seven years in the making, placed repeatedly on hold while other releases came and went, This One’s for the Dancer & This One’s for the Dancer’s Bouquet is the final album Spencer Krug will release as Moonface. Like the title itself, the album is made up of two distinct yet connected ideas. The music is culled from two separate projects, each with different collaborators, recorded in different studios, in different towns, in different years. The songs are sung from two completely different standpoints. But rather than split the songs into separate releases, or group them respectively onto the two discs of vinyl they inhabit, Krug has blended them together into one sequence; a long weave of enjoyable variation. Half the songs are sung from the perspective of the Minotaur. A whimsical, empathetic look at a monster’s demise from the monster’s POV, in them we hear the Minotaur examining the horrible nature of a lifetime trapped unjustly within a labyrinth, while simultaneously forgiving those responsible for putting him there. Here Krug collaborates with fellow percussionist Michael Bigelow, and together on marimbas, vibraphone, steel drum, keys, and drums pads the two create dense walls of rhythm with quick turns of melody; dreamy halls from within which the Minotaur’s vocoder-voice can cry out. The remaining songs are results of Krug exploring keyboard treated with delay. These too are set in a percussive world, also lush and trance-inducing in their use of fast repetition over slow progression, but with Ches Smith joining on drums and Matana Roberts on saxophone, they lean into a more improvised and acoustic space. Here Krug sings more as himself, sifting through and trying to exorcise modern-day feelings of anxiety, loneliness, regret, and alienation. The two sessions compliment each other, like sun and moon to the same musical planet. Each song is in some way unmerciful, saturated with notes that act as single raindrops within a downpour. And whether it’s Krug and Bigelow wailing on percussion as though in a race for most hits, or Smith and Roberts pouring out wild first takes onto Krug’s OCD compositions; whether it’s the Minotaur lamenting the twisted familial circumstances that landed him in the labyrinth, or Krug scraping at the earth and wincing at the stars, cursed with a human heart, the album contains a self-betraying darkness that creeps in unexpectedly, exposing real weight to what seemed at first something lighter. Though this is the last Moonface album, this does not mark the end of Spencer Krug writing, recording, and performing outside of Wolf Parade. He’s simply putting the old moniker aside in order to move forward under his own name, to release and tour new music in a more natural, real-time rhythm, and be less tied to album cycles, project names, and the past. For now, as a sort of parting gift before Moonface sails into oblivion, the alter-ego offers up this last album, a swan song, with sincere gratitude for anyone willing to receive it.

Spencer Krug, the leader of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, has been releasing solo material under the handle Moonface since 2011.

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Within the first offering of Spencer Krug's towering swan song album as Moonface before he moves on with his solo composing sans alias, there is a signature stroke that nods to why he is one of the great musical outliers of this century.

Moonface mashes two albums into one strange listen in our review of 'This One’s For The Dancer & This One’s For The Dancer’s Bouquet'