Get ready for the next CMG darling. It’s related to that other one.

Okay, so I imagine our praise for Spencer Krug’s latest by his more Krug-centric Sunset Rubdown project will be less unanimous and heady, but there are songs on Shut Up I Am Dreaming that re-affirm everything we said about Wolf Parade (that includes what Chris Alexander said) while introducing a new strength of intimacy in Krug’s songwriting and atmosphere. And, yep, “Us Ones in Between” is one of those songs.

Musty, tarnished barroom ivory cut right out the core of the Cripple Crow aesthetic starts this thing off, and it’s time for all the piano ballad lovers to step forward and admit it. (“Betz?” “Here.”) Distended electric wails provide the textured and shifting overcast of a sky that could just as easily batter the earth as it could disperse in sun. How appropriate, then, that those wails build to their cooking temperature on the lines, “You are a waterfall / Waiting inside a well / You are a wrecking ball / Before the building fell / And every lightning rod / Has gotta watch the stormcloud come…”

From there on it’s a song of chilling moments stacked atop more chilling moments, most of those held within Spencer’s vocals. The air turns darker with, “I’ve heard of creatures who eat their babies / I wonder if they stop to think about the taste,” which leads a minute later (key chilling moment in that minute: “Oh, where were you / Oh, where were you / When the fucking sun rose?”) to these isolated stanzas, underscored by a pensive fugue line: “And I am a creature / And I am surviving / And I want to be alone / But I want your body / So when you eat me / Mother and baby / Oh baby, mother me / Before you eat me.” Soon afterwards, the crescendo comes, “For I have never seen a son (sun) / That did not bury his head inside the world when day is done… And I will never like another who speaks in tongues / Who speaks in tongues (We speak in tongues) / I speak in tongues.” The outro that follows is a bracing resolution, light splitting through small rifts in the cloud curtain while at the same time that curtain rains, drizzling down illumined drops like cold sparks. Which is to say that those tinkly keys are gonna pin-prick your hearts, you saps, and that’s not to mention what’ll happen to you when you finally make out (you think) what Spencer’s singing in those last 35 seconds.

By the by, if you’re interested in my Sunday afternoon stab at transcribing the lyrics to this beauty (and most the rest of the album for that matter), shoot me an e-mail. How these words, these metaphors and half-obliquities, can be so simple and broad and yet so incisive, I don’t know, but Krug must. CMG’s Aaron Newell calls Spencer his new Thom Yorke. I call him my new Hemingway (try to ignore the hyperbolic connotation of that statement). “Us Ones in Between” is a bit like hearing a younger/older Yorke lay down a late-night bedroom record inspired by “Hills Like White Elephants.” Do you have any idea how good that is? I barely do.

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