A Week With Swan Lake's "Beast Moans": Day 2
16 November 2006
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abigail Bruley
Allow me to be contrary today, will you? I like this record for what it is and for how it was intended to be, despite the circumstatial hype about it needing to be so superly supergroup-ish. It might not last, but thoughts sometimes occur and losing them for whatever reason—stubbornness or a lack of punctuality—would be a pity. What matters today is just taking the sail down, lifting both of my oars from the water and letting my mind drift wherever it wants with Beast Moans. And this afternoon, for this second listen, especially after making that comment about too many cooks (remember?), it struck me that this is what happens when friends get together, records like this happen for a reason. Mercer, Krug and Bejar didn’t make a record to make a record for others. They made a record because they wanted to hang out together. Mercer and Krug used to live together. Mercer told us months ago when he spent time with us that during that time he greatly minded Krug’s ordering in of Dairy Queen burgers and routine rentings of “Titanic.” We’re sure that was in jest, but friends can be impossible to get along with. Those two have spent most of the year touring together. Frog Eyes was Destroyer’s backing band for a couple tours last year. They like each other and they write songs songs in their free time, in their occupied time. What they do when they’re together is no different than what they’d do when they’re apart. These three guys couldn’t just sit around in some chairs and shoot the bull about the dastardly cold weather the region’s been experiencing. It might last for a few minutes and then someone would ask, “What have you been working on?” And another person (it would have to be Mercer or Bejar) would ask, “Spencer, where in the dickens do you keep those chimes of yours? I’d like to tickle them.” The talk would gradually drift to where suggestions would be made that they should get together someday and record some things. The someday would arrive—it did—and they would finally do it. They’d be happy with what they did. Maybe there should be a privacy sign hanging from the corner of this record, because it sounds like such a personal project, for themselves and for each other. It’s nowhere near perfect and that’s the way it was meant all along. It got to us because we couldn’t live with ourselves knowing that three of the soundest living indie rock songwriters were holed up and collaborating together and making art. It would kill us dead. We made them fork over this record, so silently. But it was theirs to hold. They didn’t, but that’s what friends do. They share.
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I wrote a little testimonial over a month ago about this album, here’s what I said:
“It’s a mix of [Mercer’s, Bejar’s and Krug’s] sonic styles. Why? Because it’s all three of those band members. That may sound obvious, but most people have the far fetched idea that a supergroup would have each of them contributing 3 or 4 songs from their distinct style, throwing them into one album and calling it a day. What we have is a distinct style that incorporates what the three have been doing for years.”
Bravo Seany.