Dan Bejar’s new Destroyer album, Trouble in Dreams, is his ninth full-length LP. It is his most accessible work to date, but in a way that considers class rather than marketability.
It is a clean, punctual and glassy record, a likely and comfortable next step from his 2006 masterpiece Destroyer’s Rubies.
Bejar is a consistently prolific artist. Between Destroyer albums, he contributes to the New Pornographers and Swan Lake. This may suggest he is, as an artist, infallible (which of course he’s not-although sometimes it takes convincing me).
Bejar masters and re-masters the pop form on a yearly basis.
For those not familiar with the music of Destroyer, it is a rock band fronted by the idiosyncratic lyrical/idea-based genius Bejar of Vancouver, BC.
He employs a different lineup on nearly every record, but this one is the best he’s compiled.
Like Dylan before him and John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Joanna Newsom today, some people can’t seem to get past his voice.
It is throaty, wide-eyed and sometimes whispery; he accents odd syllables.
Some people think it’s silly, but I’ve never had an issue with it. In fact, I love it.
Bejar is and always has been a virtuoso lyricist and conjurer of great musical ideas and his voice gives everything a hospitable home.
Each Destroyer record is greatly different than the one before it, but Dreams does occupy the familiar veritable rock textures of modest guitars, piano, organs, synths, drums and voice. But nothing is tasteless, nothing is trite.
Good songwriting is the mission of Destroyer, everything consistently and impressively thought out.
He’s not trying to be hip or brilliant, it just sort of happens that way.
The second track, “Dark Leaves Form a Thread,” which would be the single if there was one, assures the listener: “Nah, it’s cool, you go, I’ll stay perfectly at home with this dread. Dark leaves form a thread.” It’s a contender for chorus of the year.
Admittedly, the polish of Trouble in Dreams puts it slightly behind most of his recent efforts. The songs are tight and signature Bejar, but the album as a whole lacks the immediate wholeness of Destroyer’s Rubies and Streethawk: A Seduction, his two stand out pop accomplishments.
I’ll let the lyrics speak for the record’s own self-satisfaction and listener-consideration, from the epic and sprawling eight-minute “Shooting Rockets (From The Desk Of Night’s Ape)”: “You love her. You leave her. You try to achieve a breadth of vision that she has from the start. I got Street Despair carved into my heart… I got Street Despair carved into my heart… My dear, didn’t you hear, a chorus is a thing that bears repeating. The problem, as I see it, is girls stay away from that shit!”
Don’t rely on Bullmoose to have a wide selection of Destroyer music, but the internet has got it all.