This Is Our Jam: Moonface, “Fast Peter”

There was a time during my burgeoning adolescence where I looked for deep emotional connection to the music I listened to and little else. This started with the Blue Album and continued through my love affair with the Saddle Creek record label (remember Desaparacidos?), and peaked in 2004 with the release of Funeral—a record that (and I’m certainly not alone here) is something of a synecdoche for that time in my life. Spencer Krug was another artist whose music I bonded with intimately from the first time I heard his old band, Wolf Parade, on CBC Radio 3 recordings in my dorm room. Krug’s wavering Bowie-esque delivery was scarily intimate, enticingly intellectual, and he frequently sang about girls (which is really what I’ve been talking about, anyway). Now, seven years after those first Wolf Parade leaks, Krug has released a new track from his Moonface project, and the reasons his music is still so pleasing are largely the same as they were in 2004.

Initially, Moonface was an experimental side project devoted to sparse instrumentation; The first record was the 20 minute Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums—a song cycle using only those two instruments. With “Fast Peter,” the title of the new record is just as literal—Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped is exactly what Krug used to compose the song. The unorthodox instrumentation is sort of tangential here, though, as the lyrics and melody outshine the limited musical palate. The track opens: “So Peter loves a girl the way that only Peter does / He told me all about her on the balcony when we were high on drugs.” Touchstones include lines about the lack of intimacy in the digital age (“They only talk on their computers”) and other barriers to modern romance. "Fast Peter" is eight minutes long, and it is great, and I think we can all relate. After all, “She’s the one, the one that he thinks of when he thinks of her.” Don’t you get it? We are Peter; This song is about us.