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HOT OFF THE PRESS – Enemy Mine by Swan Lake
It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for Nick Courtright’s weekly first glance at just-discovered music, whether it be just-released, just-leaked, or some long-lost gem that has remained under the radar. Click here for other recent editions of Hot Off the Press, featuring acts such as Animal Collective, Deerhunter, TV on the Radio, M. Ward, White Denim, and Grizzly Bear.
to be released March 24 on Jagjaguwar
Report Card: B+
There’s something inherently obnoxious about the whole “supergroup” moniker, and music history is dotted with thankfully aborted attempts to make something of the name’s lofty claim. Despite that, it’s surely intriguing when that star-crossed label becomes affixed to three guys who just a decade ago would have found it nearly impossible to develop a following in the first place, let alone such independent fan bases that when they get together to screw off in the studio it elicits all sorts of anticipatory glee-shouts. Yet in these internet times, musicians such as Spencer Krug, Carey Mercer, and Dan Bejar do have a niche in which to survivably produce some of the most intricate and conceptually demanding albums of the last few years, and even afford themselves the spare time to work on the Swan Lake project, a project best described as what happens when three mad scientists meet at a mad scientist convention and decide to be mad scientists together.
The result is a mishmash of ideas that, due to the whole too many cooks in the kitchen effect, struggles to arrive at the kind of exceptional cohesion that each of their individual works so ably achieves. On Enemy Mine, Swan Lake’s second album, and the first that people can take as a serious continuity and not a one-off dalliance, the democracy between the three friendly neurotics is both pleasant and distracting: the album has nine tracks, and each guy takes the lead on three. It’s hard to decipher the star of the show, but Carey Mercer offers what is likely the album’s most substantially astounding song, album opener “Spanish Gold, 2044,” a swirling mini-epic of tangled branches and impassioned barely-decipherable rants—in other words, it’s exactly what you’d expect, and it kicks ass. Krug and Bejar, meanwhile, each have their own startlingly excellent moments, with Bejar’s “Spider” providing a spooky psychological mindfuck, and Krug, perhaps the band member with the most upward potential, offering one of his patented stark piano creepers with “A Hand at Dusk,” a tune which feels fit for a film scene featuring someone bleeding out or recognizing the general terror of everyday existence.
In the end, the album is a cobwebby mess of a beauty, with the alternating leads working to keep Enemy Mine both fresh and frustratingly fragmented. There are ups and downs, and the album never fully pulls itself into the picturesque excellence of which these three men have proven themselves sufficiently capable. And maybe that’s a product of not enough time, too many other projects (Krug’s Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, Bejar’s Destroyer and The New Pornographers, and Mercer’s Frog Eyes and Blackout Beach, which recently leaked a stunning release of its own), or maybe it’s simply a kindly inability of any one man to take final creative control for the betterment of the whole release. But the album, undeniably, is worth a lengthy peek just for the sake of its novelty, inventiveness, and the opportunity to see what happens when three of music’s most academically entrancing and artistically polarizing figures combine their individual magics into one big stew of what-the-hell-is-going-on.
Listen to music by Swan Lake here