Moonface and Siinai - My Best Human Face

The Guardian 80

Take one admired Canadian rock auteur, add a Finnish Krautrock band and the result is an inventive blend of supercharged songs

No one could ever accuse Spencer Krug of a taking a languorous approach to his music. Over the last decade, the Canadian singer-songwriter’s output has been torrential: he’s released something like 20 albums and EPs, under an impressive variety of names. The most famous is Wolf Parade, a Montreal quartet whose very name can cause a certain kind of Pitchfork-scouring music fan’s heart to skip a beat: look online and you can find bloggers unironically describing their 2005 debut Apologies to the Queen Mary as “decade-defining”, as if rock music in the noughties changed irrevocably in its wake. Then there’s Frog Eyes, his original outfit and sometime backing band for Dan Bejar, better known as Destroyer. That association begat Swan Lake, an “indie supergroup” involving both Bejar and Krug, whose sound the latter enticingly compared to “a boar drowning in a tar pit”. There’s also Sunset Rubdown and the Fifths of Seven – challengingly described a “Canadian instrumental string/piano/accordion trio” – and Krug’s solo project, Moonface.

Even compared with a band who sound like a boar drowning in a tar pit and an instrumental string/piano/accordion trio, Moonface often seems the most abstruse and arcane of the lot. At one juncture the big idea seemed to be making records that focused on a single instrument: Krug’s first release in this guise was a 20-minute track based on the marimba; the second, an album called Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped, offered up songs performed on what sounded like the kind of electronic keyboard sold by Argos in the mid-80s; its follow-up, Julia With Blue Jeans On, was comprised entirely of stark piano ballads. In between, Moonface occasionally releases albums made in collaboration with a Finnish Krautrock-inspired instrumental band called Siinai.