Review Summary: I didn't know Wolf Parade could be so good.
Side projects are more interesting than what the initial band actually does. Everybodies heard about the band, most of them follow the antics of the band, and a select few profess their die-hardness into writing and secure a fan satisfiable work of news and art. In the depths of every band members mind there is the desperate glow of hope that one day they'll be heard, they know they will: eventually,
I will reap the credit for all of this. For the most part, it's sad to say that it never really happens. We as children were all brought up thinking that we could do whatever we wanted to, and if that involved music, than it damn should involve us personally on those headlines and album sleeves. People in the music industry want to be thought of as legends. They also want to release the finest music possible, either way you look at it. One of the voices of act Wolf Parade came to a fork in the road and had to make a two or three day decision: record this record, or not? Well, they did, and grew into Sunset Rubdown, one of the most promising new groups to appear on the waves in...like two months.
Shut Up I Am Dreaming is a fantastic mesh of happiness and gloom, lights and sounds, and both instrumental and vocal beauty. The album begins with the chilled out catchy fluid motion of 'Stadiums and Shrines', a harmonic source of what the river will soon flow to show. This band is a group of harmonics, just what rock music is all about. The band echoes as an orchestra would at a midnight performance. The voice of the singer is of a distant but gaining storytelling quality that sounds as though the torturing of tortured voices is ocurring just as the songs are being played. Especially noticable in the standout track
'Shut Up I Am Dreaming Of Places Where Lovers Have Wings' and the opening, his voice sounds so exhausted and young it brings your mood to a tired haze of intrigue, but intrigue for nothing but his stories. This music is of epic sorts, and epic films, epic books and epic albums are the ones that change the way you think for that hour long duration in which they are being played.
Fit for a storybook setting, of course the vocal quality should not be the only premise of the music. When another tells you a tale of adventure and woe, would you rather the setting comfort and relax you, or distract and gesture you to other mindsets? Well this album does both. For example the two tracks mentioned earlier are those that keep you very into the music, interested in the lyrics and what their instruments have to say. Other songs such as 'Swimming', 'They Took A Vote And Said No', and 'Snakes Got A Leg III' are all distractions. But that kind of distraction in which you are severely more interested by the attracting glance at the corner of your eye instead of what your supposed to be listening to. Those are the type of songs that place you in and out of your minds eye, an indecisive bi-polar disorder on the emotional side of your ears. Those three tracks are fire, the burning over there and the reaping over here and the heat and the cold, dead feelings of being closed in on. In a brief term, ancy. Its like indie-pop with outstanding lyrics on crack/cocaine. Wooh.
The ins-and-outs of the album are amazingly placed throughout the music. These ancy, hopped up songs move and stop, then begin moving again, and others just go as linear as a song can, but with the lack of a grey line, and instead a yellow. The yellow makes you grow hungrier for more, and soon the music delivers more. This album is a map of humane tortures and thirsts and interests. The band collects the pieces of this puzzle and with no sense of direction, splay them about your feet to bend over and put together yourself. Listening to this album is much like manually driving a car; it requires a couple inches of effort but more importantly, a few more inches of concentration and relaxation. Driving stick'll take you somewhere, and so will the music on this wonderful disc.
