Any work of art, be it an essay, a sculpture, a poem or a song, contains a single, cardinal flaw: its impact, its meaning is relative. Creator and creation are irrevocably linked, but so are the creation and its audience. Art is transformed upon viewing from a private statement expressed through personal vocabulary into something larger and less containable. The artist’s borders are dissolved; initial meanings are absorbed into a greater frame. By making the personal public, the creator gives tacit permission for anyone to superimpose their own experiences over this frame.

Certain albums gain an amount of power through these relationships. Astral Weeks, for instance, sets a specific mood, creates its own world through disposable details, both lyrical and musical; by entering into this world, you allow it to change the way you view your own.

Sunset Rubdown, for many reasons, won’t ever be as influential or successful as Van Morrison. Or even Stuart Murdoch or Jeff Mangum, for that matter. But that won’t preclude Random Spirit Lover from being for some an If You’re Feeling Sinister or an In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.

There are few albums in memory which feel as painfully alive, as vivid, manic and maniacal as this. Random Spirit Lover overpowers you, through sheer density of detail. Listening to it is a passive act only in the way that reading Melville or Calvino is a passive act. You must surrender yourself to the vision of another. The music sounds like the words, phantasmagoric, spectral and haunting, like the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz as played by a medieval Modest Mouse.

Like the majority of Rubdown leader Spencer Krug’s work, Random Spirit Lover is a world populated with horsemen, winged lovers and fragile, failed royalty. The songs bounce between verse and dialogue, acted out with near possessed fury. The increased versatility of the band deserves much of the credit. Where Sunset Rubdown’s previous albums felt more like solo projects, this is the sound of a band reaching maturity; the album bursts with fearlessness and adolescent self-conviction. Songs like Winged/Wicked Things and Mending of the Gown surge where in the past they would have lurched. The band works together creating a singular, seamless tapestry. The ballads shimmer, bending and distorting like carnival mirrors. Lyrically, Krug’s (over)reliance on animal imagery does him few favors, but luckily there is a universality to the overall theme, a blunt truth which reveals itself slowly. On one of the album’s centerpieces, Up On Your Leopard (Upon the End of Your Feral Days), Krug sings:
 
Well shit, I know we’re all growing old.
But where there’s a will, there is a way
So way to go.
Say goodbye to your feral days.

These profundities never weigh down the album. Krug balances them out with a reflexive wit, even commenting at moments on the instrumental overkill.

The structure of the album, the interconnection of the songs, the overall cycle-ness of it, makes Random Spirit Lover feel like something of a concept album, a noisome throwback to Jethro Tull’s proggier moments. The only true concept here is that we grow old, we grow bitter, we disappoint and we die. References to age and the loss of innocence pop up repeatedly. Virgins are mentioned on two separate songs, colts become stallions over the course of the record and are told to “saddle up with the width of age” and when the album finishes we are left with children, removed, returned from their future failures. Krug, perhaps too young to fully understand the wages of time, might only be striking a pose, but the power and the weight of his songs are not diminishable. Were Krug to start believing his own hype, the music would crash under the weight of its own precious quirk. Luckily, he doesn’t seem to yet. Instead of self-importance, he slings words with near schizophrenic fervor, following his own story wherever it might go. The vocals are buried in underneath heavy layers of sound, telling the audience plainly, that it’s their business to figure it all out.

After two full months of listening to this album, I feel like I’ve only scratched its surface. Yet, having not fully absorbed Random Spirit Lover, I feel absorbed by it. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to the familiar. From their inception onwards, Sunset Rubdown has been a band that requires patience and attention. The difference here is that while Spencer Krug’s theatricality felt in the past like a well-rehearsed act, here it manifests compulsively, alive and uninhibited. To non-believers the grandiosity might appear to be as empty pomp, an opinion which is, at least under shallow appraisal, unassailable. For those who keep an open mind, Random Spirit Lover offers a feast, a banquet overflowing with texture, contrast and variation. So while initial impressions might be that of unpleasantness or mild repulsion, with time the tonal ranges become palpable and the overall difficulty of the record can be viewed as an asset, a badge of its own blazing sincerity. 

Sunset Rubdown is too unrestrained a band to reach the Arcade Fire high-water mark of popularity, but that obvious fact shouldn’t doom them to self-fulfilling prophecies. There simply aren’t enough superlatives to do this justice. Many other critics will find fault with the record and they wouldn’t be wrong. This is far from flawless, objectively speaking, but flaws are in part what make it possible to form these personal connections to art. For some this will be indulgent noise and little more, for others this will prove transcendent, if also a little overwhelming. It is a choice to reduce a work to its weaknesses or to its strengths, its singularity. Art, at its core, provides a choice, to distance yourself from feeling or to hold on, to hope to stumble back upon whatever it is that made you love life in the first place. This is precisely why we form bonds with books, songs, photos, paintings etc.; we’re searching for a context by which to understand ourselves. Random Spirit Lover won’t be that context for most, but it will for some. And that’s more than enough reason for such shameless praise.    

Release date: 08/10/07
Artist website: www.sunsetrubdown.net
Label: Jagjaguwar

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