That put the album in a whole new light….

I was being put off by the cheesy aspect of the lyrics, but now they just add to the awesomeness.

Dragonslayer (it’s name taken from an eighties sci-fi movie from what I understand) is a campy record. It’s brilliance is that it manages to be both grandiosly campy while at times, (in my experience) eliciting a real emotional connection…

But mostly its just fun.

I really don’t think Sunset Rubdown is a band that could be charged with taking themselves too seriously…they’re far too ironic, and self-deprecating for that. (Note the constant forth wall breaks in Random Spirit Lover (Do you think the second movement has too many violins?)

The intentional camp of this record I think is most clearly evidenced in Black Swan, when after the first round of the incredibly silly: “My heart is a kingdom/where the king is heart/My heart is king” there is a pause, the music cuts out, and Spencer delivers with a kind of comic timing, “the king of…hearts.”

What I think makes the record special aside from my own subjective percpetion that the thing is just gleefully fun and each moment packed with interesting melodic ideas, is that it tells a kind of story in its own way. In my interpretation, the album is about moving on from the end of a relationship/concomitant growing up.

Themes of leaving things behind, learning to tame one’s desires, growing old, permeate nearly each track in one way or another. Likewise, there is a “you”, who is also at times referred to as “Anna”…some woman who the “protagonist” seems forced to leave behind.

What makes the sudden change in the final track so great to me, (the part in which dead leaves…leads the speaker to suddenly, vividly describe leaving what is presumably an ex-lover’s train station) is that it suddenly plunges us, vividly into the real world contemporary reality which has been expressionistically represented throughout the rest of the album. Amid the dragonslaying, butterfly eating, buffalo hunting, and ghost chasing, we are given this really well written account of a mundane scene, which ties the album together through the image of dead leaves, one of the first introduced in silver moons, and returned to in dragon’s lair.

This to me is what makes the album special/powerful…It is a real mundane emotional experience of loss that is being expressed in an absurd/riddiculously grandiose manner…to me that’s the whole idea of it…the end of a relationship…the moment of pulling away from a lovers station knowing these days are over, is transformed as in the imagination of a child to a grand quest, in which simply moving on with ones life and learning to grow up becomes a mediavel mission to conquer dragons and free rapunzels.

Anyhow this is what the album evokes for me. My main arguement is that grandiosity is the whole point, its turns a story of mundane adult melancholy into a child-like bombastic adventure.

Anyway, just a look at the cover art and title should tell you self-seriousness is not the album’s primary trait.

The grandiosity, etc is also what makes Sunset Rubdown so good imo. I think comparing them to U2 is very unfair as U2 are so desperately rooted in the real world. Maybe the Waterboys comparison is more apt but since when was that a bad thing? I think we as a civilization need to come together and acknowledge that ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ is one of our highest points to date.