Oh! You  pretty things! Sunset Rubdown came through to the Echoplex – just downstairs from their first show ever in LA @ The Echo (“We’re really moving up. Or down?” joked keyboardist and vocalist Camilla Wynne Ingr) the same day that their latest LP, Dragonslayer was officially released, and isn’t that very lovely of them? Lovely! This is the 6th album by Sunset Rubdown and that’s not even counting Spencer Krug’s other projects, Wolf Parade, Swan Lake, and Frog Eyes. The band, now fully five members, back what is primarily Krug’s songwriting and, showing up in unusually jovial and chatty form, holding up his drink and toasting us all with a sweet “Cheers!” at the show, I’m here to let you know Spencer Krug is on fire, people. Dragonslayer gives us some incredibly well-constructed songs that are full of the archetypal language that Krug does so well (“…so this is for the critics, and their disappointed mothers / for the cupid and the hunter, shooting arrows at each other”), and yet simultaneously manages to find a groove really unlike anything any other act is putting out. Taking center stage last night like the leading man that he is (some of you may already know this, but Spencer and I are going to run away together and be lovers forever? Living in the forests outside of Montreal? And writing songs? And drinking whiskey, but also sometimes just tea. This is not at all true. Yet.), he joked about an audience member shouting out “It’s my birthday!” (Spencer: “Oh it’s your birthday? Today? Well way to go. You just got more old.”) and that two of the band members were starting a band called Space Jungle (they are absolutely not starting a band called Space Jungle) and getting a gentle friendly ribbing from the always lovely and perfect counterpoint Camilla Wynne Ingr that they didn’t have a setlist, and whose fucking fault would that be? The band played a fantastic set, including “Us Ones In Between,” which is the most beautiful, heartbreaking song ever, and ending in the brilliant ten minutes plus bang-out, “Dragon’s Lair,” introduced by Krug as, “This song’s kind of a clusterfuck.” If that final number is a clusterfuck, I want in. You go on ahead, Spencer, you’ve got to fight the good fight for at least a couple more years. I’m not a widow yet.

—Chesney Higgins