Words: Shawn Goldberg
Photo: David Horvitz

Anyone expecting restraint in the new Sunset Rubdown album Dragonslayer is wrong. Only one song is less than five minutes long; one exceeds the ten-minute mark. The lyrics are crowded with archetypes and objects in psychological disguises, and anthems are elevated into towers that wobble grandiose in the sky. Yet such extremes also find the band honing their unrestrained sensibilities into terrains of inventive chaos that always astonish with a justifiable squall of bombast.

REAX: What do you play?
MD: I play mostly guitar. Drums on a few songs and bass sometimes.

REAX: How did you get involved with Sunset Rubdown?
MD: When I moved to Montreal I started playing in bands, and I was playing in a band with Wolf Parade drummer Arlen Thompson. This is before Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner moved to town and formed Wolf Parade and wanted Arlen. So Arlen was - he’s always used to playing in two or three bands, but Wolf Parade started to explode, so he left my band. And I met Spencer through Arlen, shared a jam room.

REAX: You recorded the new record with Graeme Gibson. How was that?
MD: Incredible. He has a really nice live setup. We had a bunch of room mics. Mic’ed all the amps. He’s a drummer as well and set the drums up really, really good. It was fantastic. I was really happy with the sound.

REAX: Why Chicago?
MD: What we wanted to do was tour and play these songs every night so we could get really good at them, and tight. And Chicago was the last date of the tour. Actually I think we might have played Toronto or Montreal after that, but we settled on Chicago and Graeme was there. Spencer and him are old friends from British Columbia.

REAX: What’s your favorite song to play on the new album?
MD: “Black Swan.” I like the dynamics of it. I think that’s something we haven’t tried too much of. I think it’s an intense one. Bring it down, bring it up. “Dragon’s Lair” is pretty fun to play. But I’m always excited to play “Black Swan.” It has a lot of energy.

REAX: Do you think there are any major differences between this record and the last one? Or do you think it’s more of a continuation?
MD: Well, both things, it’s sort of a bit of both. Spencer, he’s on a songwriting journey and especially with the lyrics - they’re changing, I think in my opinion, a little bit. He’s becoming a little more direct in some songs, a little more straightforward in what he’s feeling. It’s a bit of both. The way it’s recorded is different. But some of the themes, though, it’s his territory. He’s working through it. He’s growing, definitely growing as a songwriter, as a lyricist.

REAX: You have a new song on the album, “Paper Lace.” Why is that song included on Dragonslayer? It’s the only song that’s also on the second indie-rock supergroup Swan Lake record. Did you just enjoy that song a lot? Was it a random decision?
MD: We worked out our version for Sunset before we left on tour, with the idea of recording it. Maybe putting it on the record, then probably putting it on the record. It’s my least favorite on the record. I think it’s almost like an exercise in pop or something. It’s a weird one. I have fun playing it. It almost makes me laugh every time I play it. I don’t really know where that one came from, but I think it sort of sticks out like a sore thumb on the record. I’ve had close friends of mine say it shouldn’t have been on the record. We made a decision and stuck with it … we go from one extreme to the next, so to get really corny and poppy is not totally out of our potential direction.

REAX: How does a song for Sunset Rubdown come together?
MD: Spencer has a chord progression. You know, verse, chorus, bridge, coda, something like that. We work on our dynamics and make decisions, try different things. Maybe a melody we have to pick out for it, a piano line. He just lets us do our thing. Jam it out.

REAX: I wanted to ask you about the album cover. Was that a pre-designed image? Were you just messing around in a junkyard?
MD: On our first tour by ourselves, we stopped at a roadside attraction somewhere, I’m not sure where it is now. But an ostrich farm, meteorite, and petrified-forest sort of roadside attraction. It had this dragon sculpture. It’s a long time ago those photographs were taken. It was just for fun, and we always sort of like those photos. Warren Hill took the cover shot from down below. I took the inside shot, sort of in the distance, and Warren took the rest of the incidental shots of the mannequin. It’s just a roadside attraction somewhere in the States … it’s a little literal to have a dragon on the cover. But I think it’s neat how the sculpture, the aesthetic of it is a little raw, kind of haphazardly thrown together, which is a little how we come off, you know, just looking at our instruments on stage there’s a lot of clutter, there’s a lot of junk onstage. I think there’s some similarity in the aesthetics of that, raw, stripped-down, like these are Christmas lights. We’re not trying to fool you, it’s not really a dragon.

REAX: At the end of the record “a bigger kind of kill” is a line that’s repeated over and over again. What does that mean to you?
MD: To me, it means maybe getting to a point in life where you’re looking for a little more. Like you’re getting old and your life seems to need more focus and you’re looking for a little something, it’s bigger, it’s just like you want to keep growing, keep making your next accomplishment, or your next day, or your next minute better than the last or more satisfying. I think it’s about growing up and getting your priorities in order and facing reality and working harder toward your goal … also it’s really cool to think about a dragon being slain.

Dragonslayer is out now on JagJaguwar Records. The band tours the U.K. in September.
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