What’s next to be caught in Spencer Krug’s scattershot of ideas? How about long winded organ based music? Krug’s Moonface project surfaced last year with the twenty minute song Marimba and Shit Drums (a song that sounds exactly as its title suggests). This year, Krug has acquired himself an organ or two and set out to create ornate drone music. Only about half of that came to materialize on Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hope. While the songs are definitely fashioned out of detailed complexities, they only drone in the sense that they’re somewhat long-winded (with each track stretching out to about eight minutes in length). On the five tracks on this album there’s a limited amount of sounds that are available to draw from. These limitations are self-imposed, no doubt, but for what he has to work with Krug extracts a great amount of affection from the purely keyboard based atmosphere.
Suicide’s ghastly doo-wop, Neu!’s hypnotic chug, and electronic Kraftwerk wizardry are all wide reaching influences (or at least, references) made on this album. However, there’s an installed sense of pop melody that cant be escaped on these tracks. Layering melodies atop of each other, tracks such as “Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor” and “Whale Song (Song Instead of a Kiss)” both grow to mammoth proportions. The payoffs are hard earned, however, when those sudden climatic melodies surface and bubble atop of the thick layers of keyboards underneath it makes one willing to sit through another seven minutes or so to see if such another change could occur.
But perhaps sparks of brilliance only strike once or twice, because for the pace of the rest of the album inevitably slows down to a near halt. “Fast Peter” is perhaps more immediate than any of the other tracks on the album, but with its reliance on one or two melodies and the hilariously aimless and indulgent keyboard solo that occurs near the end of the song, it’s enough to drain me of whatever magic Krug bewitched me with on the first two tracks. And while “Shit-Hawk in the Snow” and “Loose Heart = Loose Plan” makes up for “Fast Peter” they’re only good enough to swing this album from the direction of a “bad album” to a “decent album”. These two tracks are a bit more dramatic, borrowing drums from breakbeat and hip-hop influences which keep the amorphous keyboard landscape pinned down. They’re certainly good, however, they sound more like jams and less like finely tuned popcraft. And yet at the end, I still enjoyed this record. It’s nothing essential, but at least it plays to its influences with an ideal amount of knowing when to experiment and when to simply reiterate.
Drone pop? Yes please. At least the first two tracks are necessary.
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