City Wrecker

Canadian-born musician Spencer Krug formed solo vehicle Moonface around the time his well-loved indie band Wolf Parade went into a state of indefinite dormancy and his other project, Sunset Rubdown, also disbanded. A talented and prolific songwriter, Krug immediately set to work on Moonface, using his first few albums to explore instrumental sketches and conceptual songwriting before moving from Montreal to Helsinki, Finland in 2012. In Finland, Krug put to tape the beautifully spare Moonface album Julia with Blue Jeans On, a lushly desperate collection of songs made with only piano and Krug's wavering, serious vocals. The five songs that make up the City Wrecker EP follow much the same pattern as Julia with Blue Jeans On, sticking to spare piano and vocal arrangements sometimes augmented with moments of spacy synthesizer. The mood throughout these songs is somber and full of regret, Krug singing lyrics of displacement and disappointment over relatively empty but gorgeously sad piano backdrops. The title track is perhaps the most anthemic of them all, with a strong melody carrying lyrics about leaving one city for the next when all bridges have been sufficiently burned. The final two tracks stretch out the gloomy tone of the album, with both "Helsinki Winter 2013" and the harrowing "Daughter of a Dove" stretching out over the eight-minute mark. These tunes are impressively epic, with "Daughter of a Dove" being particularly reminiscent of Krug's former Swan Lake bandmate Dan Bejar's theatrical compositions for his main band, Destroyer. The EP feels like a great extension of Julia with Blue Jeans On, and one can't help but wonder what phase Krug will develop toward with the next Moonface installment as he moves from one place to the next.