swan lake

A Week With Swan Lake's "Beast Moans": Day 1

14 November 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abigail Bruley
Flawless in concept, Swan Lake made nipples across the country and up through the Canadian boundary waters hard when word started pssting around the ol’ Internet that three of the most indubitable songwriters of the current year and many previous years were putting their heads and instruments together up there in frosty Victoria, B.C., to make a long player. Here was Dan “Destroyer” Bejar, fresh off of one of the year’s most enigmatically mesmerizing records in Destroyer’s Rubies. Here was Spencer “Sunset Rubdown” Krug, whose Shut Up I Am Dreaming and its subsequent b-sides/unreleased songs only happened to make him undefeated for the year. Here was Carey “Frog Eyes” Mercer, who is the best showman and probably the most indispensable songwriter of the cadre, writing some of the most noticeably strong music of his career. And there they were aboard this clipper ship, bound for some uncharted waters, though with their recent activities, the consensus was that this bound to be a choppy maiden float. How, out of that great big fucking ocean, could they have found the one iceberg? It’s the question it seems to need asking upon the first appointment with “Beast Moans,” an album recorded as a testament to friendship, eternal and otherwise,” but not a testament to properly stating a mission and then assuaging it. These are three great men, with powers far beyond the looksie of a trained eye, and they’re stepping all over themselves, not in an attempt to outshine the other, but just because they think they’re helping. They’re there so they may as well do SOMETHING on the song, in this part, over-top this other part, while he’s doing that other thing. There is a lot of needlessness on these songs. Oh, you’ve heard the one about too many cooks in the kitchen, but this isn’t about keeping a mother-in-law out of the Thanksgiving turkey-making business, it’s about something important: a record that could have been a treasured artifact. There’s a long sigh in me tonight because of this. It’s not what I wanted to type. But the good news is that in four days, we could learn to love each other. We will learn whether that iceberg is just a paint chipper or if it will give our clipper a black hole to its nose, sending all the deck chairs overboard for a cold, wet bath.

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