Sunset Rubdown – The Garage, London – 15/9/09
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Sunset Rubdown have only been to the UK once before, but from the size of and rapturous reception granted them by the crowd at The Garage in a hideously wet North London tonight, you’d think they lived just up the Saint Paul’s Road and had a season pass to every night at the Hen and Chickens theatre on Highbury Corner. Though they hail from Montreal, Canada, they’re accepted as local heroes from the first note.
It strikes me upon witnessing the band live (for only the second time) that they share in fact a remarkable amount in common with another of today’s great bands, Brookyln’s Dirty Projectors. Though the DPs might favour syncopated rhythms and niggling, repeated hooks over Sunset Rubdown’s penchant for a thicker kind of orchestration, both bands share a desire to keep things interesting for both listener and performer at all times, never slipping in to any structural tricks you could deem even slightly predictable. It’s high brown indie rock, and not ashamed of showing that fact off – nor of having some fun with it.
Yet some accuse the Dirty Projectors of not being emotionally involved enough in their music, positing that they’re ruled to their detriment by a love of precision over passion. It’s not something I’d agree with, personally – but it’s certainly not a charge that can be levelled at Spencer Krug’s Sunset Rubdown tonight. The man sweats buckets for the purposes of entertaining the crowd with the songs as they expect to hear them – with all the strained emotion and desperate yelps that characterise the band’s four remarkable albums. And though there’s a slightly ramshackle edge to their proggier moments, they can be painfully precise when they want to – drums-man Jordan Robson-Cramer really is one talented son of a bitch.
Work from all the latter three of said records (the first being a solo, distinctly lo-fi affair) is aired, the most recent Dragonslayer forming much of the opening half of the set, before the likes of ‘The Mending of the Gown’ and ‘The Taming of the Hands That Came Back To Life’ from Random Spirit Lover and an alarmingly weighty highlight of ‘The Men Are Called Horsemen There’ (from the must-have Shut Up I Am Dreaming LP) remind us that Sunset Rubdown haven’t started being an awesome band just recently. Newer works like ‘Idiot Heart’, and performances with as much vigour and perspiration as this one, suggest they won’t stop being one soon either.
Photo by David Horvitz
Artists in this article: Sunset Rubdown
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