AOTS: Sunset Rubdown, Shut Up I Am Dreaming

Most of the time, an album focuses on one or two things. Lyrics, maybe, or the fact that you've got a great guitar player, even, perhaps, that you bought a new distortion pedal last week and are desperate to show it off. Shut Up I Am Dreaming focuses on none of these things. Or at least, not just those things. Like in Spencer Krug's day job Wolf Parade, everything is thrown at your ears all at once. And boy do I mean everything. In Wolf Parade, you get the feeling that at least one person in that band knew the meaning of the word restraint. No such word appears in the dictionary of Sunset Rubdown. Krug, however, has a fantastic ear for melody, for contrast, and for making songs that on paper sound shambolic and clumsy sound perfectly centered between what-the hell-am-I-doing-now and military precision. The band pulls back when they need to, like on The Empty Threats Of Little Lord, and goes full throttle on others - Snakes Got A Leg III, for instance. Krug's lyrics are pretty much genius: "And I'm sorry that your mother died / But that one wasn't my fault." from opener Stadiums And Shrines II, or  "I've heard of creatures who eat their babies / And I wonder if they stop to think about the taste." from the stand-out track Us Ones In Between. They're a band that transcends genre boundaries and throws conformity out of the window along with most of their sanity. It works for them though, this crazy, hard to swallow collage of sound. Of course it works. Maybe it's too much at first, maybe the best way to take it is to listen to the tracks separately. But listen to it, please. It's beautiful, fascinating, confusing, and very possibly one of the best albums of the last ten years.

10/10

(and here's the album on streaming site We7)