Sunset Rubdown Ditch The Studio Magic

06/18/09 2:48pm

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

Sunset Rubdown and Handsome Furs are both technically bands, but they've also acted as vehicles through which Wolf Parade collaborators Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner have traded album-by-album blows since 2006.

With that in mind, it's hard not to envision Sunset Rubdown's latest record, Dragonslayer, as a well-timed counterpunch to the Handsome Furs' Face Control.

CHARTattack got the scoop on Dragonslayer's genesis from keyboardist/percussionist/vocalist Camilla Wynne Ingr while she jarred her homemade marmalade.

CHARTattack: Marmalade?
Camilla Wynne Ingr: It's a fledgling business... in case the band doesn't work out.

Let's talk about Dragonslayer. How long had you been working on this album before it could be officially declared finished?
As far as writing the songs was concerned, that happened pretty organically. I'd say it happened over a period of about a year.

We did a three week tour that ended in Chicago — it was basically three weeks of paid practice — and we spent a week there, doing the recording. We mixed over maybe four days, here in Montreal, in January.

Was Dragonslayer as the title a group decision?
I don't know... I think we generally leave the naming of the songs and album titles to Spencer. He controls the lyric writing.

Was the recording process any different than it was for Random Spirit Lover?
It was almost all recorded live off the floor. We toured it into the recording, so we'd be really tight playing it together live. It didn't totally work out that way — a couple of things ended up getting tracked individually — but for the most part, that's Spencer's live vocals. It's a little stressful to record that way, but it's fun, too.

Both albums before, there had been a lot of building up stuff in the studio — a lot of studio magic, if you will. This time we just wanted to represent our live show.

One of the album's songs, "Paper Lace," was taken from the latest Swan Lake album, right?
We added a couple of new instruments but it doesn't depart much from the original. It's the same chord structure and lyrics but the instrumentation is different.

I noticed a theme in the words that were used to describe this album in the press release. It was called "screwy pop-rock," a "skewed approach to pop" and the word "crazy" was tossed about a couple of times. Do the five of you view your music as screwy or crazy?
I guess that's apt... I think we were going for a bit more of a poppy record this time — eight straight-up songs. We never totally succeeded at being straightforward, I think.

How so? Because of direction changes... or song length?
Definitely length. You don't see a lot of 10-minute singles out there. I think our songs average around six minutes. And our instrumentation — it's a little different than the standard drum, guitar and bass. And Spencer also writes some pretty sophisticated chord progressions that are sometimes daunting to learn. It's not just chorus, verse, chorus, bridge.