Vancouver’s Dan Bejar (aka Destroyer)—you’ve got to love him. From his histrionic vocals—he sounds like nobody else on the planet—to his songs, which bring to mind David Bowie at his most glam, Bejar is one of a kind, and I’ve been pressing his records on people since I first heard 2006’s landmark Destroyer’s Rubies. Songs like “Looter’s Follies” and “3000 Flowers” blew me away with their big dramatic flourishes, out-of-kilter guitars, and Bejar’s sui generis vocals and enigmatic but always entrancing lyrics. “Those who love Zeppelin will soon betray Floyd,” he sings on “A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point,” “I cast off these couplets in honor of the void/I was here to stay/I would weather the storm/I pictured heaven on earth made of clay as your form dictated…” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but that first line always cracks me up and I want to hear more.
Destroyer has evolved from the rough sound of 1996 debut We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge, growing more grandiose as Bejar’s vision has expanded. One critic said of Destroyer’s debut that it was “a concerted effort to make the recording downright inconsumable; the guitars are always out of tune, and the vocals of Fisher-Price quality.” But he soon remedied that, slickening up his sound, and has spent the years since careening from raw to slick and back again. He doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck about fan expectations; he’s got a sound in his head, and that’s that. For example, 2011’s Kaputt is jazz—and lounge-infused, which I found a letdown; the same went for 2013’s Five Spanish Songs, on which he sings in Spanish (duh), depriving me of the joy of trying to wrap my mind around the feints and flurries of his enthrallingly cryptic lyrics. Did he ask me what I thought of these stylistic about-faces? No, he did not. And I’m not happy about it.
One of Bejar’s most notable switches in direction occurred following the release of 2004’s Your Blues, on which he utilized mostly MIDI instrumentation for the backup music. As if that didn’t startle and confuse his fan base enough, he followed Your Blues with 2005’s “Notorious Lightning and Other Works,” an EP on which he rerecorded six of the songs off Your Blues using fellow British Columbians, the idiosyncratic Frog Eyes, as a backing band. Me, I think it’s a vast improvement; Your Blues was a decidedly bloodless affair, lacking in Bejar’s breathless bursts of vocal intensity, and sounded both cold and slick to me.
“Notorious Lightning and Other Works” opens with “Notorious Lightning,” which is almost 4 minutes longer than the version on Your Blues. It opens with the electric guitar of Carey Mercer, and then Bejar comes in sounding, as he so often does, like a breathless and excitable fop. At the chorus his vocals rise to Himalayan heights, as the band (and particularly Melanie Campbell on drums) crashes away behind him. Then comes some cool guitar, while Bejar repeats, “Watch notorious lightning surround you” and “Someone’s got to fall/Before someone goes free,” during which he is joined by gale force winds of guitar. After that he utters nonsense syllables, Frog Eyes still making a din behind him, before the song winds slowly down, Bejar continuing to sing, “Li li li li li.” But the stop is a false one, and Bejar and the guitar return, playing a melody that reminds me of Ziggy-era Bowie. I like it, but it goes on and on, and I had been the producer in that studio I’d have urged him to excise the last two minutes or so. Alas I am but a record producer only in my own mind, and the last time I tried to sneak into a studio I got thrown out on my ear.
“New Ways of Living” is also an improvement on its Your Blues counterpart, chiefly because Bejar goes semi-berserk on the choruses, and Frog Eyes is there to provide the appropriate backup. He lets loose with the great lines, “I wore skins/I didn’t care who survived/The band foretold trends from Spring of ‘85/They’re calling it “The New Decay”…/Hey, so am I.” At the halfway point the song slows and Michael Rak’s tambourine accompanies Bejar as he repeats the lovely refrain, “It’s you and your kind/The New Ways of Living” while the band again jumps in to deliver the electric goods. Meanwhile, “The Music Lovers” is a stone cold classic, starting slowly with some big drum thump and a raw guitar riff while Bejar sings, “We stole a gondola to sea/And ditched the chaperones on jewel-encrusted roans/Who called us unprofessional.” But then comes the big chorus, on which the band goes wild while Bejar cries, “Here, the people say they just didn’t want it enough/We were… the music lovers!” And so it goes, from brief quiet interludes to loud passages during which Bejar throws himself into the lyrics like a man tossing himself into an abyss. Until he finally sings, “Sister, the world cannot hold us/Brother/You can go your own way” and the song explodes, with Bejar singing nonsense syllables to the accompaniment of a soaring guitar and some badass drumming, until the tune’s end.
“An Actor’s Revenge” opens with some guitar feedback and moves at a rip-roaring speed, Bejar singing every line like his very life depends on it. The guitarist shreds, Bejar tears into the lyrics like a man possessed, and what lyrics! I have no idea what “The kids twist and shout until the womb fucking wrecks it!” means but I like it, just as I like, “There’ll be talk/There’ll be action/Boys demanding satisfaction from girls/Oh, you’d hate to play a girl!” Meanwhile Grayson Walker adds some synthesized horns, contributing to the stormy backdrop against which Bejar casts his mysterious pearls of inscrutable wisdom, and the end comes with Bejar singing about “an emotional history of the Lower East Side, cause it was wild! It was wild!” Hey, I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you. “Don’t Become the Thing You Hated” boasts a lovely melody, one beguiling guitar riff, and Bejar repeating the title in a slow chant. To say nothing of a tremendous chorus, with synthesized strings and Bejar singing, “Let ‘em in” over and over again. As for Mercer’s guitar solo it’s a thing of beauty, and takes the song out. For once Bejar abandons his gift for intricate word slinging to adopt a simple message, and it works.
“Your Blues” opens with Bejar singing acapella, beginning with, “Why does every one of her lovers leave her?” and ending with, “How is it that we can be both skating and dying?” before the band comes in on a lovely note, with a simple but beatific guitar riff and Bejar repeating, “Love knows I’ve been trying” for a minute or so, at which point the melody stops and an organ (played by Mercer) and the guitar play a brief bit, only to return to Bejar repeating, “Love knows I’ve been trying” over and over again. Then the guitar and organ come in again and it’s beautiful, although the horn and overdubbed vocals of the original, which is also lovely but in a lusher way, make it tough to decide which version is better.
Dan Bejar is one of the most unique performers on the indie rock scene, from his voice to his stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and I for one was disappointed by 2011’s Kaputt, which marked a return to the synthesized neo-lounge sound of Your Blues, only more pronounced. It’s a slick piece of product, Kaputt, produced to within an inch of its life, and with horns that border on smooth jazz, and I find myself hoping that 2006’s brilliant Destroyer’s Rubies doesn’t turn out to be the high-water mark of Bejar’s career. But I probably need not worry. Bejar likes to keep people guessing, and his next LP could very well his best. One thing I do know is that you shouldn’t deny yourself the pleasures of the Destroyer experience. Love him or hate him, there’s no doubt he’ll take you to aural places you’ve never been before.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
