Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped

With keyboard and drum machine-led swirls, higher-pitched and echoed vocals, and an embrace for what could be called art-pop-not-rock, Moonface's Organ Music is very much in the right place for 2011.

The end result is a sound that feels both modern and ancient: the glorious sequence of arpeggios that rounds out "Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor," for example, owes as much to Baroque counterpoint as to progressive rock or synth-pop. And yet, throughout the course of the album, these influences are melded seamlessly into a sound that is unmistakably Krug's own: dour, wistful, and tragic.

While Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped is a five-song study on what the keyboard instrument is capable of, at least it's rendered through the hands of a skillful musician, with a tenured history for delivering compelling music.

Much like the way the organ music builds and builds, Krug seems to open up more and more, making the end result most definitely worth the effort.

Thematically, Organ Music… re-visits all-of-the-above, but Spencer's more lucid in his metaphors than ever before but loses none of the mystique for doing so; listening to this is like realising you can suddenly speak horse, or whale.

Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped is about as ambitious as 35 minutes of music can get, and Krug gets an awful lot out of one instrument here.

While the album is by no means a disappointment, one can't help but long for the return of a less inhibited Krug, free of – albeit self-imposed – limitations.

Krug won't make any new fans with Organ Music, but that's not what he's trying to do here, anyway. He's just having himself some fun-or, as he put it, "lurching toward" his musical ideas "impulsively."