Spencer Krug: Same Fangs

Spencer Krug has always been mysterious and obscure, a strange ghost crafting a seemingly endless series of towering, off-kilter songs in the wilds of Canada. Same Fangs is his sixth solo record in five years, alongside his work in that same period with Moonface and Sunset Rubdown. It is, crucially, his first project since his 20-year-old song with Wolf Parade, “I'll Believe in Anything,†blew up when it was prominently featured in an episode of Heated Rivalry. That's not to say that Same Fangs makes any gestures toward commercial sensibilities or widening his audience. It is, in fact, an indirect statement that he's perfectly happy with the audience he's cultivated already.

Krug's songs have always felt like they had their genesis at a piano in a deserted room. If you strip away the massive guitar and synth blasts of “Stadiums and Shrines II,†it's a lonely piano ballad about lifting your dress up to the ceiling tiles. Julia with Blue Jeans On, the third Moonface record, is just Krug and a piano. There's some familiarity with the approach he takes on Same Fangs. The entire album continues with the idea that you could place Krug at a dusty piano and get the same song, albeit with a few less accoutrements. It's also largely a meta commentary on how Krug writes music. The opening track, “Get to Live,†establishes both of these themes well. Krug muses to himself about cutting parts of a piece he's writing and then re-arranging them into something else; by the time his voice and piano work come together, we're given a sketch of a song, one verse and then done.

The central motif of the album is a song Krug “wrote on the Sunset tour†called “Listening to Music in Cars.†References to it can be found in the early track “Timebomb,†and then when the album arrives at “Listening to Music in Cars 2.5 (All the Tired Horses),†where it's explicitly stated that the reason for this framework is because the song was abandoned partway through to write the former. There are also references to both “The Men are Called Horsemen There†(from Sunset Rubdown's 2006 debut) and “The Mending of the Gown†(“One of Sunset's few hitsâ€). There's also a brief reference at the end to, as the title of the song suggests, Bob Dylan's “All the Tired Horses†from his relatively obscure 1970 Self Portrait album. The “songwriters on songwriting†meta commentary is self-indulgent and might have gotten tiresome, except that Krug brings his usual inscrutable self to the writing and so the listener ends up getting tangled into it as well.

It helps that the compositions are strong. “Berserker Mode†comes close to being an alt pop single, with a mutant shuffle and a dense melodic structure that breaks out into a solid hook at the most opportune moment. “Secret Bridge†features an understated guitar line that entwines the song's structure like roses along the ruin of a wall. “Hasn't It Always†and “List of Names†have the same effect — they start off sparse and then grow until by the end they're threatening to bring all the walls of the room down in one final crash. Both prominently feature one of Same Fangs' secret weapons: sweeping string arrangements from Maria Grigoryeva, a Russian musician Krug worked remotely with to provide depth to the album's instrumentation. Whenever Grigoryeva's work appears, it serves to elevate Krug's songs onto a sharply more emotional level. The final song, “Souvenirs,†takes all these aspects and cranks them up to maximum effect, letting Same Fangs ride out on one of Krug's most expansive and harrowing compositions to date.

Nothing on Same Fangs is likely to strike the TikTok scrolling masses quite as hard as “I'll Believe in Anything.†Like most of Krug's solo work, it will cause some ripples among his true believers but mainly live in the deep obscurity of the content-clogged modern world. Even if Krug is content with his current audience, though, his work on the album deserves wider notoriety. They're not pop songs, but they are soulful and emotionally gripping, more evidence for the idea that Spencer Krug and his piano are one of the most powerful duos you could hope to come across today.