With Dan Boeckner soon to hit our shores for a Handsome Furs tour, his Wolf Parade bandmate Spencer Krug has just crisscrossed North America with his ensemble Sunset Rubdown before preparing for a European trek later this year. Following the critical favourites Shut Up I Am Dreaming and Random Spirit Lover, Sunset Rubdown’s new Dragonslayer is a feverish sprawl of harried indie rock with prog-y undertones. Krug’s desperate yowls still make for the band’s garish guiding light, but the songs are longer this time and newly peppered with nods to mythology. Despite the recurring themes, expanded breadth, and fantasy slant, however, Krug insists it’s not a concept album.

Is there a storyline tying together the songs on Dragonslayer?

I don’t think so. There are some themes that pop up over and over again, but that wasn’t intentional. It was probably just a product of a lot of the songs being written around the same time in my life. It’s not a concept record by any means.

There are several references to mythological characters. Have you always had an interest in that stuff?

Well, I can’t say always, but yeah, for a long time. It’s a really shallow interest. I took some classes on mythology at some point in college, but I’m not a real historian of Greek myth or any culture’s myths. I sing in a lot of metaphors, as a way to find language that’s more engaging and beautiful for me to sing. I sing about what anybody is singing about: your life and loved ones and what’s going on around you. It’s all just metaphor. If there’s references to myth, they’re about as informed as they sound. (Laughs) I’m not trying to make any sort of comment about those characters or deconstruct them in any way. It’s just a loose reference.

You’ve often used animals as metaphors in the past. Have you moved beyond that now?

I guess so. Maybe. I’m trying to be a little more straightforward. I mean, I think I’ve always tried to be more straightforward, but I just kind of suck at it. But I might be getting slightly better at being less vague and abstract with what I’m trying to say. Incorporating a lot of animals or fantasy imagery or mythical characters … I think those are all symptomatic of just not having perfected the sort of language that I’d like to be able to sing with. I would like to one day be able to have my own kind of lexicon.

There are a lot of keyboards on this album. Are you writing songs more on piano than guitar these days?

There’s no more keys than there were on any of the other records. Maybe they come through more because Camilla [Wynne Ingr] got some new keyboards that don’t sound as shitty, so we’re not burying them in the mix quite as much. But it’s about half and half, guitar and piano. What I’ll often do is teach myself to play a song on piano and decide then which instrument I prefer to play it on. Lately I’ve been playing a lot more guitar because I don’t have a real piano in my house. It’s less satisfying to sit down at a digital instrument and try to make some connection with it.


Sunset Rubdown - 'You Go On Ahead' live fan vid

A few songs are quite long on Dragonslayer, and the second Wolf Parade album had much longer songs than the first. Is that something that’s just naturally happening?

Yeah. It’s definitely not premeditated. After Random Spirit Lover, I was talking to the members of Sunset Rubdown and I was like, ‘On the next record, let’s write a bunch of short pop songs. Like three- to four-minute pop songs.’ That was the plan, and then Dragonslayer is what happened. Somewhere in the back of my head was brevity and being a little more succinct, and yet I still ended up with these seven-minute and 10-minute numbers. I don’t know why. And I’m not disappointed that we have long songs, because I’m not going to force things to be something that they’re not. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.

I read that you were trying more “straight production” this time to keep things raw.

It was just a matter of doing way more live [instrumentation]. Most previous albums were done layer by layer, and a lot of writing was done in the studio. I would have a core idea, but we would build it up in the studio with a half-baked experiment that would sometimes succeed. Then you mix it together, come up with a song, figure out how to play it live, and go on tour. That way of working is fun, and it has its merits. With this [album], we got a fifth member who plays bass, and the rest of the band has been playing together for three years. Things are starting to sound more fleshed out and powerful live. So we did a lot of the writing in the jam room together, and everyone had a vague idea what their parts were. We took the songs on a short tour and then went in the studio the next day, because a tour tends to really solidify a song. Everything gels together by that point in a tour, after two weeks. It’s still exciting; it’s not stale yet. It’s like a magic formula, trying to get that sound on the record. I wanted to try to capture that energy for once, instead of this more cerebral, layered energy. It might have worked. I don’t know. About 80% of the record is live.

Do you think the more expansive nature of Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer influenced Dragonslayer at all?
 
No, to be honest. I didn’t really go from one to the other. At Mount Zoomer was recorded two years ago. We sat on it for a long time, and then we went back and mixed it and did overdubs. Whatever you did before is going to influence whatever comes next, but you never know how it’s doing that. It just informs it.

Is Wolf Parade planning an Australian tour at some point?

Not that I know of, but I’m definitely not against it. I’ve never even stepped foot on your continent.

Dan is about to be here with Handsome Furs…

I know. He’s lucky. Because they’re a two-person crew, it’s easier. We’ve yet to be invited. But I’d love to come. If Wolf Parade starts touring next year, who knows. But I have no idea what’s happening in 2010. For the rest of this year, Sunset Rubdown is booked out.

And will you be starting a new Wolf Parade album soon?

I don’t know if we’ll start on a new record, but we’ll start playing together again in November. We’ve been on a break all this year so Dan and I could focus on other things. We’ll take it from there.

Dragonslayer is out now.