Spencer Krug – I Just Drew This Knife LP Pronounced Kroog

One night, at some unrelated recording session, years ago already, handsome young Browning whips out his phone to show old Koop and even older Krug the instrumental recordings he’s made over the pandemic, saying that now that they’re finished, he doesn’t know what to do with them. The music coming from the phone is dark and sparse, but also slick; tight enough to feel like some kind of twisted pop. The two old ghouls’ mouths start to water and their eyes bulge. Krug rubs his greedy claws together and says, I might have an idea.

At home, in his studio (lair), old Krug chops up one of young Browning’s works, rearranges the parts to suit his own freakish needs, then squawks out an ill-conceived incantation overtop. He sends the whole mess to creaky Koop, who, in turn, from within his own dank cave of gadgets and oddities, skronks onto the franken-song his eccentric idea of what a guitar melody might be. They deliver the concoction back to young Browning, its progenitor, and cringe in wait for his gen z insults that they won’t understand, but he is unexpectedly pleased.

Still, they make tweaks. They tweak until the annoyingly subjective and idiosyncratic desires of all three are barely satisfied. Hoor-rah! they cheer, Krug coughing through the “rah,” having not lifted his arms that high in years. The three unlikely collaborators then decide they will make an album this way, repurposing Brownings perfectly fine and lovely instrumental tracks into “better” “songs” by unnaturally forcing them into pop structure-shaped holes, then adding lyrical phrases of vague meaning and forgivingly distorted guitar.

They work remotely, and slowly, posting a single demo onto Krug’s dubious Patreon page monthly, until finally a whole record’s worth of songs exist. Our three near-unemployed musicians then convene eagerly, desperately, in the woods, at a studio ridiculously called “The Studio,” and re-record the entire batch of deformities into one surprisingly cohesive collection, each song like a button-eyed bear sewn from parts of other bears, with pink and purple arms never meant for the beige torso onto which they’re now fastened.

(Oh yeah, then they added “The Shadow,” which was made earlier.)