From Asia to Temple of the Dog, the output of rock supergroups tends to bow to the hubris that the designation implies. The world of indie rock, on the other hand, seems to have had much better luck, with the success stories (the New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, the Raconteurs, the Postal Service) outweighing the also-rans (Electronic).
Based on the strength of their debut, Beast Moans, fans can now add Swan Lake, the collaboration between Dan Bejar, Spencer Krug and Carey Mercer to the ""wins"" column. Individually, Bejar wears the hat as one of rock's best lyricists while writing hyper-literate pop as Destroyer, Krug co-fronts the melancholy, ramshackle indie act ""Wolf Parade,"" and Mercer whispers, rants and shrieks ferociously at the helm of ""Frog Eyes.""
The close relations between its members (Mercer has backed up Destroyer in the past; Krug is also a member of Frog Eyes) make Swan Lake a relatively safe collaborative venture, avoiding the usual problems of musical incompatibility and clashing personalities. While this easy synergy could have led to each member simply writing songs in their own respective vein, to the band's credit, Swan Lake make an attempt to branch out beyond each individual's material. The result is a sound more straightforwardly beautiful and low-fi than any of its component parts alone.
The album opener, the Bejar-penned ""Widow's Walk,"" swoons and sighs like ""Your Blues""-era Destroyer with its oscillating synthesizer riff but crescendos into a wash of noise more akin to a Wolf Parade track. Mercer's ""City Calls"" seems to eschew the influence of any of the members' back catalogs, tracking heavily-reverbed vocals over a steady drone of guitars and keyboards.
The feature that most distinguishes the tracks on Beast Moans from the respective day jobs of Swan Lake's members is not the spacious production, however, but the songs' lack of structure. While Destroyer, Frog Eyes and Wolf Parade generally tend to build songs with discernable verses and choruses, Swan Lake deals in much more open-ended, often hookless compositions. Though this does help to differentiate the songs on Beast Moans from any of the group members' past output, it also makes many of the tracks much lighter and less immediately affecting than what they could be producing individually.
The evidence that the members of Swan Lake do their best work when working within tighter bounds is in the fact that the best songs on Beast Moans are also the most tightly structured ones. Album highlight ""The Partisan but He's Got to Know"" jumps off in typical Frog Eyes style with a frenetic verse-chorus-verse repetition that segues into a haunting run-on sentence of a coda. The gorgeous ""Are You Swimming in Her Pools?"" is the most straightforwardly indie-pop song that any member of the group has done, more closely aping the Shins than any of the members' solo acts.
With three of Canada's most talented songwriters joining forces for Swan Lake, anything less than an unqualified success is going to seem slightly disappointing. Though Beast Moans doesn't measure up to the best of any of its creators' outside work, Swan Lake has succeeded in creating a compelling album that can stand alone from any of the talents going into it.
