Swan Lake: “Enemy Mine”

It’s probably fair to call Swan Lake an indie rock supergroup — at least to the extent that there can even be such a thing as an indie supergroup. None of the band’s three members are household names exactly, but what they lack in star power they more than make up for in prolificacy: Carey Mercer is the mastermind behind the warped, herky-jerk indie pop of Frog Eyes, while Spencer Krug does double duty in a pair of indie staples, Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade. And Dan Bejar is pretty close to indie royalty, playing not only in Canada’s New Pornographers—the greatest of all indie supergroups—but also the critically beloved Destroyer.

But these three men aren’t just indie stalwarts. They’re also indie eccentrics, known as much for their strange lyrical conceits and vocal tics as for their inverted and subverted understanding of what pop should sound like. And therein lies the central danger of a group like Swan Lake: Any time you rope together three such distinct talents, you can’t help but get three distinct egos, and when those egos are as prone to inspired weirdness and offbeat ambition as these three, the potential for a trainwreck is fairly high.

Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.