Destroyer: Trouble in Dreams
Label: Merge
The problem with describing the latest effort by genius Dan Bejar (also of New Pornographers and Swan Lake) to someone who’s never heard his work as Destroyer is that such description falls flat in the wake of its magic, even making it sound unappealing – rather than one of rock music’s greatest recent accomplishments (which it is). Let’s see: Bejar’s voice is quite nasal, with a vocal delivery that verges on simply talking, his lyrics are extremely erudite and his references esoteric, and his meandering song structures barely imply hooks and choruses. But! Taken together with lyrics whose brilliance cannot be overstated, his appealing world-weary Casanova/professor persona, and well-placed, classic-sounding piano and guitar flourishes – these liabilities become assets, elements of the gorgeous document that is Trouble In Dreams. Despite the sheer volume of words Bejar uses (and the high quotability of his verse), his refrains, with extended vowels repeated into hypnosis, are what ultimately make his songs so stunning; by the fourth time he intones “we live in darkness/the light is a dream you see” during the album’s central eight-minute epic “Shooting Rockets,” it’s difficult to imagine listening to anything else. Destroyer as closed system: an idea extended by Bejar’s tendency to reference his own lyrics from previous albums. His self-referentiality is only one way in which Bejar inverts pop songform on Trouble In Dreams: the wan, half-hearted tone he uses for his well-placed “ba da da dum” vocal runs shows his nod toward, as well as rejection of, classic rock song structure. And his frequent intentionally-awkward internal rhyme forces the listener’s attention back to verse structure, poetry, and artifice – reminding the listener in form as well as in lyric (“my dear, didn’t you hear/a chorus is a thing that bears repeating”) of the contrived nature of songcraft. But none of his genre-inversion cuts down on his melodies’ simple beauty or his lyrics’ compelling story-arcs; Trouble In Dreams, like his Rubies and Your Blues before it, is simply a momentous and lovely record whose depths reward further plumbing. (Anna)
