The first response to a Sunset Rubdown song has to be a powerful one. Take yourself, for instance, and now think of yourself as a sliding glass door, just Windexed up, clear as a contact lens. You’re just locked in, keeping the inside in and the outside out, providing the boundary between nature and the dining room table. Then BAM! A sparrow slams right into your windowy chest and falls limply to the concrete ground below. Spencer Krug’s songs make you feel like both the sparrow and the sliding glass door. You’re dumbfounded and dismayed because the music is like a raging bonfire that catches the bottoms of your pant legs ablaze and then hits you between the eyes with shovel. So you burn and you pay attention. It jars something loose and gives you life in the places of your body that don’t get courted enough by modern song. It feels miraculous and so human it hurts because you begin to question how much you’re really getting out of your own life if Krug is able to get so much out of his that it yields such insightful observations and celestial verses. He’s winning and you’re just merely participating. It’s not true, really, but it is true that he has a way of capturing the burning embers of whatever’s worth caring about and whatever’s most savory. We were lucky enough to spend parts of three days with Krug, his band and tour mates Frog Eyes when a fortunate three-day hole in their tour schedule left them without any shows and here in Iowa. We gave them a home, let them use a shower, a computer and watch the third season of Aquateen Hunger Force. Never before have I even thought it appropriate to say that the songs speak for themselves, but it has never been truer. For Daytrotter, Sunset Rubdown played one gorgeous new song called “Winged/Wicked Things” and three versions of songs that are strikingly different from their recorded versions. “They Took A Vote And Said No” came about when we had less than three minutes left on our 15-minute reel of tape. Krug said, “I think we can do it” and then went at the song in warp s peed to the glee of all the members of Frog Eyes in the control room. This is special and I expect to hear about it. – Sean Moeller

First song
Winged/Wicked Things (Sunset Rubdown) [4.22MB] [30135 downloads]


– unreleased song

“Yes. This is a new song. You guys have the first recording of it. It’s a song I wrote on guitar, originally.”
So I say it’s the white hair of Poseidon ebbing in the tide, in some dead sea…But the pattern of light is chaotic and blind but it’s right cause chaos is yours and it’s mine and chaos is luck and like love and love blind.

Second song
Jason Believe Me, You Can't Trust Your Dreams (Sunset Rubdown) [2.68MB] [19999 downloads]


– unreleased song
“No, that’s the real title. It’s from an EP that came out about four months ago, I think. The EP is just me doing all the instrumentation, with Camilla doing some vocals, so the full band version is quite different. That’s why we wanted to play it for your site. Something new…”
You can’t trust your dreams when they take you alone in your room…you say love’s gonna die they say love’s gonna come home

Third song
Shut Up, I'm Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings (Sunset Rubdown) [5.62MB] [23851 downloads]


– original version appears on “Shut Up I Am Dreaming”
“This one changed a lot from the record to the live version, both in terms of who’s playing what and a reworked ending, so we thought it’d be fun to do for your site as well, so that people aren’t hearing what they could just hear on the record.”
My notes: the glockenspiel from this song could pierce through a drunken pack of World Cup hooligans – it must be loved for all its glory
Ocean’s never listened to us anyway and if I fall into the drink I will say your name before I sink

Fourth song
They Took A Vote And Said No (Sunset Rubdown) [2.13MB] [15909 downloads]


– original version appears on “Shut Up I Am Dreaming”
“This was fun because we played it about three times as fast as the recorded version – other than that though it’s pretty much the same as the record.”
They said a ride is never free, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t see…so be careful what you wish for

Purchase Sunset Rubdown music at: insound