Those are the moments that make Marimba and Shit-Drums more than just a gimmicky stylistic constraint. There's even a satisfying resolution, where Krug drums the listener back to wakefulness while meta-commentating on the instrumentation by concluding in double-track, "I am making hissing sounds with my mouth." There's a dream logic to both songs, a sense of progression and narrative despite cut-and-paste lyrics, and each has a slowly unspooling structure that brings to mind a palindrome. But I'm also reminded, more recently, of Destroyer's "Bay of Pigs", last year's example of an indie icon working with elongated song length and unfamiliar instruments. The sloppiness of those shit-drums may be what keeps Krug's composition from being a stripped-down version of a Tortoise epic- the back half of "Djed" isn't too distant of a cousin.
The song's most radio-friendly segment is just such a moment- eight minutes in, where Krug's hazy beach visions are suddenly made urgent by a clattering drum part and geysers of spiraling melodies. Every time the marimba waves threaten to engulf Krug, the drums splash in like a life preserver, adding a welcome sonic backbone. Still, thank goodness for the shit-drums, which are appropriately named in terms of their fidelity. But Krug escapes strictly avant-garde territory, layering melodies until they take on the busy, crowded quality of an 8-bit RPG's dream sequence music. Through the instrumental segments the blocks' woodier vibrations start bleeding together into a gamelan-style pointillist drone. Run a rapid tempo on the high tones, and it sounds like a wind chime caught in a hurricane, or a slot machine symphony. At low tones, it sounds like someone dribbling a ceramic basketball around an empty gym. The result could have been idle indie rock tourism, but Krug clearly spent some time learning his way around the marimba's blocks, making an instrument rarely encountered in rock into an appropriate vehicle for the REM sleep journey the song narrates.Īs Krug plays it, the marimba is versatile. As a love letter, Krug's EP, a single 20-minute track, is closer to a novella than a valentine. So leave it to Spencer Krug to put an idiosyncratic spin on the instrument on his Dreamland EP, helpfully and truthfully subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums.
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