No, this song's not as carefully labored over as something like Spoon figuring out just where to place their mariachi burps in between their tambourine shakes; it's got nothing like jet sounds incorporated into pop tapestries, sorry Panda Bear-huggers; also, it's not kind of boring. It is a song unhinged and unbridled, gushing out of its own ragged seams. It is, of course, a cousin to that Frog Eyes record. And it's the most exciting bit of indie rock to hit my ears since, well, the last Sunset Rubdown album.

Spencer Krug's imagery has become more ridiculous and fantastical, and that's relative to the same dude that wrote "The Men Are Called Horsemen There." Here the subject rides about on a leopard and throws "dead birds in the air," but Krug's exhortation is a piece of poetry that still resonates through the increasingly dense mythos that Krug is building with Sunset Rubdown, a work of imaginative allegory that in a simplified and modern way is a bit like Spencer doing Spenser (i.e. Edmund). With "Up On Your Leopard" Spencer laments the binding down of a free spirit, trying to shake the victim's complacency with lines like "you're the one kissing your captor's hand." Key lines fall over each other and drums rattle at their bars, then the band takes a breath before launching into the coda, a quickening cry: "Your highness is holding your chains." It's a line weighted and emphasized just as much as it's worth, that worth being the finest lyric I've heard this year. Someone check Krug's pulse -- the kid might be ready to supernova. Something about stars burning brightly and quickly, knamean?

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