MP3: Sunset Rubdown - "Idiot Heart"

Can you imagine what it would be like to hang out with Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner for a day? Between the two of them they are in a staggering five legitimate indie-rock bands (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake, and Frog Eyes) which have put out at least ten albums in the last few years (not including Krug's other other other band, Fifth's of Seven which is mostly instrumental stuff). Assuming that there are about ten songs on an album, thats an absolutely ridiculous 100 songs that the two guys are responsible for within the last couple of years.

If you were working on a shoe-string budget, you could probably track and edit an entire song in a solid days work. If you were on task, you could probably mix the song in another day, easily. But that's not including rehearsal time, pre-production, and mastering -- and on top of that, time to actually write and compose the songs in the first place. And, oh yeah, and you have to tour the country with each band as well -- which takes months! Currently Spencer merely touring the freaking WORLD and is preparing for a show tonight in Paris, France. He'll be in Germany and Russia before the end of the month and here in Los Angeles by June. I just got a little dizzy.

It amazes me that either of these guys can still find time to be creative. Let alone, the fact that all of these bands consistently churn out critically aclaimed albums is just unreal. "Idiot Heart", is the latest single released from Sunset Rubdown's upcoming album, Dragonslayer. Spencer says that this song has more of a "live-type feel -- which means that rather than recording one instrument at a time, they opted to record most instruments at the same time in the same room. Artists usually like to do this to give the song a more "live" feel, because the instruments bleed together through the mics and the artists vibe off of each other as they're playing. In Spencer's case, when I hear that he is recording something for a live sound it really translates to me as, 'lets record this as quick as possible because I have to be at 800 different places today because I'm in 20 freaking bands'!

This song also uses interesting panning on the guitars, as did the Moby song I posted a couple days ago. In this case the band has two guitars playing conversing riffs, one guitar panned to the right, the other to the left. The guitar panned to the right either has a pitch shifter effect on it, or the engineer is boosting the dB of the sound at a narrow bandwidth, and sweeping across the range of frequencies. As the engineer sweeps from the low frequencies to the highs, and back and forth, it results in that swooshing sound that is pretty apparent in your right speaker.

MP3: Sunset Rubdown - Idiot Heart.mp3

Sunset Rubdown's tour starts tonight in Paris -- more dates, including Texas and California dates, after the jump: