Preview
DESTROYER
Tuesday, March 27
Night Gallery
A Bowie-style chameleon from the start, Daniel Bejar (a.k.a Destroyer on the album sleeves) has taken his music from lo-fi bedroom trickery through glam-inspired rock opera theatrics, sloppy booze-addled jam rock and back again, each incarnation unmistakably him. With little more than a handful of chords and a heartbreaking, if surreal, sense of lyrics ("it was back amongst the living/ your smile was giving me a thrill," the opening lines of "Farrar, Strauss & Giroux" on Streethawk gets me every time), Destroyer have consistently come through with some of the past decade’s most exciting music, rock or otherwise.
For Your Blues, his most recent album (the second since unceremoniously strolling away from the Can-indie supergroup The New Pornographers), Bejar’s stripped everything back to the bare essentials. Embracing the limitations at hand in a studio stocked only with a small pile of aged synths and an acoustic guitar, Bejar’s taken dead aim at producing an epic.
Whether he succeeds or not is debatable – a gourmet banquet served on paper plates still tastes pretty good, but synthetic strings and horns will always sound like a mall aisle Mr. Entertainment keyboard demo. Thank heavens then for the songs – oh, the songs! – each one a slow-groover that reveals its deceptively simple layers slowly, sharp focus placed on the narratives built from the non sequiturs and riddles of Bejar’s lyrics. While I may not have much of an idea of what he’s getting at midway through "An Actor’s Revenge" when he shouts, "The kids twist and shout until the womb fucking wrecks it!" I know for certain Bejar really means it.
While on the first few listens, Your Blues sounds like an unfinished set of demos for a far more orchestral album of a grander scale (I admit some early disappointment with it, particularly considering my love of the glorious mess of last year’s guitar marathon This Night), given time the pieces all fall into place – the man responsible obviously far smarter than most of us.
In his own defence, Bejar embraces that very reaction. "I understand that it’s easy to misread this record as some attempt to build pop symphonies. I couldn’t care less about that. I needed these songs to sound abandoned or bombed out because that’s where the good tragedy and romance hides. If you’ve ever seen a cathedral or a monster hotel that runs out of funding, you know that it leaves an impression. I wanted to make a minimalist and maximalist record at the same time – so I did."
Put in that context, Your Blues is a masterwork of embracing limitations – whatever’s around put in service to the music, the songs never subservient.
In live performance, however, the Your Blues experience becomes by all accounts something different altogether. Utilizing the crazed hysteria of newcomers Frog Eyes as backing band, Your Blues transforms into a full-on rock spectacle.
So then, at closest inspection Your Blues works best as a two-part piece – the open-ended studio album and the live reconfiguration with all different and new pieces to the puzzle.
"I think that’s so cool that it sounds unfinished, like the third Big Star record or the third Royal Trux record. Or This Night, for that matter, which in places sounded like a heap of bones we just walked away from," he says. "Or at least I hope it did. My original intentions were set on a grander scale in that I intended to make a record that would efficiently end my career in music and call into question other things about my well-being, but I showed up with the wrong songs."
Rather than an album of could-have-beens, Your Blues proves itself possibly the most interesting chapter in the Destroyer story, itself as unfinished as Your Blues at first appears. |
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