Spencer Krug has made another Moonface record, this time with the help of some new friends. The third product of an ongoing series of changing collaborations and approaches to tune-making is called With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery. Surprise, a two-part title. Let's bust in to this brothel one door at a time. With Siinai: Siinai is the Finnish band Krug worked with on this album. Krug met Siinai when their former band, Joensu 1685, toured withWolf Parade throughout Europe in 2009. Over the following year, friendships were born, Joensu 1685 broke up, Siinai was formed and Krug unexpectedly received a copy of their first album, Olympic Games. Siinai could safely be described as progressive kraut rock. Their songs are long and heavy, often gorgeous, repetitive, with slow subtle hypnotic changes that bring to mind a single cell splitting into two. Also of key interest to Krug at the time: they had no vocalist. Krug asked if they wanted to make an album together, a collaboration wherein Siinai would perform the meat of the music, andMoonface would take care of the vocals (and ultimately a few licks on the keyboard). Upon agreement from Siinai, Krug arrived in Finland in August of 2011 to begin restructuring demos and write a few tunes from scratch. Big beats boomed. Colours burst. Krug's addiction to melody and pop music met Siinai's love for simplicity and their rare patience for music that slowly evolves, and something somewhere in the middle was created. It was a compromise that everyone enjoyed making. Heartbreaking Bravery: The lyrical theme of this album is heartbreak. According to Krug, it was not planned, but became obvious halfway through the writing process. Some recently battered, still mildly swollen heart snuck its way into the first lyrics written, so he went with it. He wrote songs based on his own experiences with heartache, stories told to him by friends, and drummed up scenarios of ill-fated love that were absolute fiction.Altogether, the inevitability of life's flawed and failed relationships, the shitty feelings we feel as a result, and the people we become (ugly, brave, violent, crawling like babies back toward the womb) while trying to deal with those feelings are the ideas explored in these songs. It is not a particularly original theme, but one Krug felt worth digging into, perhaps deeper than he ever has before. If there is a place that is beautiful only because it's too dark to see whether or not ugliness exists, that's where you'll find these songs and their characters.A place where the cry for unrequited love is rich and silky. Where falling bodies hit the ground in time with the synthesizer's arpeggio, while old men hold out their guitars to disinterested young lovers, so that they might study the dark-red patterns in the grain. A place where Moonface stands on a sidewalk not wanting to go home, not wanting to make his flight, doesn't hail a cab, then picks up his suitcase and walks back into the hotel.