Destroyer and the 2010s

I found myself saying, "Of course I have hipster tastes, I listen to Destroyer, for God's sake."

I think people, including I, are always wondering if there are any great bands of the modern age, a la The Stooges or The Breeders. I like to give myself credit for also thinking, Well, no one thinks a band is great until after they're over. Like, over-over, not Sleater-Kinney-over. Like, there's just absolutely no way they're coming back together-over. (The Stooges did reunite, though, to the surprise of no one, they SUCKED!) "Final" is the threshold between good and great. History has a way of enhancing things. We can wrap our head around closed, unchanging things. At least, we feel safe commenting on them.

Destroyer is going to be remembered as a great band a million years into the future, where music critics born in 2033 will say, "We're never going to get a band like them again" (which is partially true). The reasons stem from that uncritical expression beginning this article: Destroyer is more than a band, they're the crystallization of a series of ideas. Hell yes is the music precious and pretentious. But across time, it's been consistent, thematically and in terms of quality. It's truly rare when you can dance around a discography, picking up this song and that song, and realize they're all good, as well as different in their own way. The only reason why no one thinks of Destroyer, at the moment, as a capital-G Great band is precisely why they appeal to hipsters: they haven't changed the world yet. Only weirdos who like Dan Bejar's melancholy and wordplay lack the shame to dislike them. But the world will change. And it will be embarassing, in the same way Beatlemania was. But it's more embarassing that no one is talking about them.

I missed the opportunity to analyze Destroyer's output in the 2010s, which is probably the group's biggest decade, artistically and critically, yet. Let's rectify that omission: let's look at the band's albums, starting from 2011.

Kaputt (2011)

I intentionally spoke very little about "Kaputt" in my 2010s list. I probably shouldn't speak of it now. There's only so much space in the world to talk about "Kaputt". But let us try.

I can say a million things about how great "Kaputt" is, but the best thing I can say is that it's one of the stones to the temple of how I look at art, in terms of lyricism, in terms of personality, in terms of fantasy. I really can't divorce myself from the album. "Kaputt" made me a hipster, who sighs at everything and finds beauty in pissing in the ocean and watching punks kick a ball. For better or for worse. I think, for better. In that sense, the album is as monumental as The Smiths' "The Queen is Dead". It makes not giving a shit about anything look fashionable, which idea would horrify Dan Bejar. But he might smile at being compared a rock god on the same heights as Morrissey.

Let's begin by mentioning the band. It's true the band centers around the vocalist Dan Bejar, crooner, poet, all-around sad sack. But from "Kaputt" onward, we'll see a few faces carried from album to album: John Collins (engineer, producer, bassist), Ted Bois (keyboardist), and Nicholas Bragg (guitar). I have never picked up an instrument ever, but they sound great. More importantly, they make the lyrics work.

I always thought the first verse of "Kaputt" was self-evident: "You can't believe, / the way the wind was talking to the sea." This is where an entire universe opens up, especially for little ol' me, who had never heard a Destroyer album before. Those little alliterative w's going towards "sea" is the wind itself. And "can't believe"... he beggars the audience's belief, he beggars his own belief, and, as the album unfolds, we find he is looking for someone else's belief. A lover. A friend. Someone who is, simply, gone now.

The immense power of the album comes from that painful absence looming over every song. That breathless verse in "Blue Eyes":

You terrify the land, you are pestle and mortar,
You're first love's New Order,
Mother Nature's son,
King of the Everglades, Population: One,
I write poetry for myself, I write poetry for myself...

He's aware he's muttering to himself, but does he realize that he, ever the egoist, longs for someone to hear his half-hearted poetry? "She said: I won't and I never will, I won't and I never will..." Well, she hadn't, and will never. This point is made only sharper in "Savage Night At the Opera"; that withering line, "I heard your record, it's alright," is half-true and half-not. Most records are, objectively, alright, but the way Bejar simply does not care makes it seem below him. Well, maybe for the real-life artist, but for his character? Probably not.

"Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" is a rambling mess (not of a song, of course), and, from thereon, the album opens up and the narrator allows himself some genuine feeling, beginning with "Poor In Love", and that eternal verse, "Why's everybody sing along / when we built this city on ruins?" He's as much the Western civilization he decries, himself having been built on top of crap. That critique, "I heard the record, / it's alright", in "Savage Night At the Opera?" Returned back at him, in "Song for America": "I wrote a song for America, / they told me it was clever." Ouch.

Must we speak of the glorious "Bay of Pigs"? That introduced me to the band. It is a true Joycean epic, a long ramble along the shore where Joyce often rested and Bloom spied on Gerty MacDowell. The first line is pure Dedalus too: "Listen, I've been drinking, / as our house, lies in ruins, / I don't know what I'm doing, / alone, in the dark, / at the park or at the pier, / watching ships disappear, in the rain." Never mind everything I've said; "Kaputt" is the greatest book Stephen Dedalus never wrote. Away, away with it; we can't sit here and talk about "Kaputt" forever. We'd be here longer than if we read Joyce's paperweights of novels.

Poison Season (2015)

I would describe "Poison Season" and "ken" (2017) to be experimental albums. As to where those experiments went, I don't know. Artists possess the most privileges when it comes to failure, next to, maybe, the Royal Family.

There's an incomplete attempt to write a song cycle and Burt Bacharach tearjerkers here. Either would be interesting, under Bejar's doomer hipster edge. But "Poison Season" comes off unfinished and unpolished; the lyricism, certainly, sounds like entries in Bejar's journal, albeit very funny. It helps that the band is swinging, Ted Bois on piano and JP Carter on trumpet.

In this recent re-listen "Bangkok" stands out, Bejar crooning, "Like you, I've been / around the world, / seen a million girls, / I've seen Bangkok," bestowing on that famous city an age-old melancholy. This is the romantic from "Kaputt" accepting his obsolescence, passing wearily into his death. It kicks off with Springsteen-ian "Dream Lover" and seems to tumble downwards into doom, going through various experiences as told in "Hell" and "Girl in a Sling". The centerpiece and its two reprisals, "Times Square", are the crossroads the singer keeps iterating through.

Well, that's my attempt at giving the album a unifying idea. There really isn't one. The "Times Square" motif is a little nonsensical, and "Poison Season" I & II feel like toy compositions only meant to give the album a semblance of order. "Archer on the Beach" is far too sedate, Bejar is too quiet for "Midnight Meet The Rain", "Forces from Above" is meandering and "Solace's Bride" is...well, it's alright. I am a believer that writing is about perspective, and I think in all of the aforementioned compositions Bejar doesn't have a specific character - in lyrics or in music - to steer the audience into anything particular.

That being said, if you were to take the lyrics and put them naked on the page, like a novel, you could argue that this album is better viewed as a set of vignettes starring different characters, first- and third-person. I like this idea the most, but none of the vignettes stand on their own, and neither do they work well juxtaposed next to each other.

This is no Bob Dylan album. If Dylan fancies himself a Rembrandt, able to interact with his subjects and himself at different angles and distances of remove, Bejar seems closer to Kara Walker, whom he namechecks in "Kaputt", whose art is two-dimensional from the outside appearance yet interacts with whatever surface they're painted on. Kara doesn't indulge in color but she is fascinated with shape and juxtaposition. Destroyer is the same. Interaction and play are key to Bejar's artform. Dylan can put his subjects on a pedastal, while Bejar is curious, plying them with soft-spoken jokes and rambling anecdotes. For that reason, the operatic "Poison Season" isn't very good, though it's interesting in that you always wonder what can be done with it. Though it's plodding, it was a serious attempt to create a smear of the character he had been cultivating for a while, dissolving his ego.

ken (2017)

For the precious few Zoomers reading my essays: no, not that Ken. Kenough, I don't want to hear it.

He's less sleepy in "ken" than "Poison Season", which is nice. The drum is a big part of it. Blame (or commend, as I do) Josh Wells, drummer of Black Mountain, who produced the album. I don't have the most discerning ears, so what distinguishes "ken", to me, is the very, very obvious drum machine, to the point where the music sounds like Thrill Kill Kult or Ashra. By Jove, it doesn't sound like techno, nor is it dance. Come to think of it, it's very LCD Soundsystem. The stomp introducing "In the Morning" sounds the same as the one which begins Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody".

What makes synths interesting is that they don't leave much residual echo; the beat, sometimes, says as much with silence as not. This record still has a horn (in "Tinseltown Swimming in Blood", "Rome") and a guitar ("Cover from the Sun"), but you can never shake off the woodenness of the synthesizer. Nothing wrong with woodenness, of course; the '80s, which Bejar took direct inspiration from, found remarkable ways to create pathos from rigidity, post-punk, pop, disco, et cetera. Though the production was incidental, one can't help but wonder if Bejar knew what he was doing: that he connected the stiffness of the synthesizers to the awkwardness of youth, is too tantalizing a connection not to make.

A special mention should be made of "Saw You at the Hospital", which is the least driven by this aesthetic. It sounds like, well, a normal acoustic Destroyer song. Given that it was inspired by an incident during the tour for "Poison Season", it does indeed sound like a highlight on the prior album.

Compared to "Poison Season", most of the lyrics are first-person (that memorable fugue in "Sky's Grey", "I've been working on the new Oliver Twist, / I've been working on the new Oliver Twist, / I've been working on the new Oliver Twist...") or declarative ("Stay Lost", "Stay lost, / never found, / out on the street, / in the Book of the Dead, / for a living" which, for whatever reason, makes me think of the chants of Nitzer Ebb). That, too, can be attributed to the egotism of the '80s. But I don't mean "ego" only in the sense of narcissism, I also invoke the sad-sack romanticisms of New Order. There is little of Bejar observing in this album, he is declaring, and declaring, though it interrupts, it moots, it overrides, can still reveal the narrator's modesty and misery. In an interview with Treble, he said he "was obsessed with images, man." I think that may be where Bejar's experiment with post-punk and his adolescence ultimately went: a tactile approach to the music and his subjects, signified by the creeping, consistent beat, that unfortunately doesn't mesh too well with Bejar's almost-stereotypical shrug at life and its problems.

Up until this point I never cared too much for "ken", but on this review I found myself liking many of the tracks and respecting all the others. The lyrics of "In The Morning", "Yeah, you wanted it to be cool, / oh, you thought that it would be alright, / in the morning", have been occupying my head as of late. The guitar beginning "Sometimes in the World" sounds like shit, and it's great; that track, in particular, has vestiges of "Poor In Love" from "Kaputt", in breadth and in subject matter. And I quite like the aforementioned surrealist "Stay Lost".

I think, before we head to "Have We Met" and the new decade, we should note the progression from the jazz-influenced "Kaputt", to the operatic "Poison Season", and finally to the new wave "ken". Actually, what more is there to say? it's all already conveyed in the last sentence: the band had been moving to less and less excessive states. Bejar still loves that fucking horn (and I do too), but what dominates the solos in "ken" aren't winds, they're electric guitars and synthesizers, which don't have, what I call, delicious reverb, particularly in the ending track of "ken", "La Regle du Jeu". Lyrically we've moved from the pseudo-philosophical rants of "Kaputt" to the bitter complaints of "ken". It's almost as if Bejar was actually reflecting on the bullshit coming out of his mouth, trying to make them tangible; and if he can't, he casually dismisses them. This all goes into the "dark" "Have We Met".

Have We Met (2020)

I was like the laziest river,
A vulture predisposed to eating off floors;
No, wait, I take that back, I was more like an ocean...

signals Bejar's triumphant return to being an excellent liar.

Bejar recorded the vocals for the album at his kitchen table at night, and then sent them to the band's producer, John Collins. He hilariously described the work as such: "I'd just give the whole thing to John and have him just blow it up, flesh it out -- swap out my shitty fake drums for cool drums, and play bass on it, and make the synths cool and not generic, and make the songs move." They were the first or second takes. When I read this, I thought, "That's the Pandemic for you."

In hindsight, that's one of the major factors going into this record: "Have We Met" is about the emotional distance that comes from the Internet age. Not that this is an unfamiliar theme for Destroyer. There has always been a distance from what Bejar's characters see, how they feel and express it. But he had never been so isolated as to feel almost entirely numb. So goes the lyric in "Crimson Tide": "My condition, in general, despite what they say, improves / so I could care less, on a night like this, / I'm on the lookout for anything that moves.

In turn, that is one of the major differences from "Kaputt": though Bejar has returned to character writing, the character is more...confused than a genuine asshole. Back to "Crimson Tide": "Is that yours? Throw it in the pot; / I thought I was smart, I'm not, / I thought I was sick and dying." The narrator certainly spends most of the album unsure of anything, physical or mental.

"Kinda Dark" advances the idea of mental fart, with the beginning verse,

You wandered in there, you wanted it in there,
you wanted it in there, every night you took the air,
gasping for anything, there sits the Boston strangler.

which is not evoking actual murder, but the implication of something dark lurking in the path one regularly walks on. Our daily routines stink of death, and, to me, the Pandemic, and other coinciding events, reeked, even if no one you knew actually died. So the bit of humor at the end: "Kinda dark in here, she says," as if making fun of the narrator's pretending.

"It Just Doesn't Happen" continues the wordplay: "They play your favorite song; / she's just too dark to care; / high water everywhere; / smoke gets in your eyes." Again, the darkness is a feeling, not a reality, which returns to the chorus: "You cast a poisonous look to the sun; / you know it just doesn't happen to anyone," which has echoes of "Cover from the Sun" in "ken". If "ken" is about Bejar's adolescence, "Have We Met" seems to be Bejar accepting age, with that bitter resignation that "this doesn't just happen to anyone" (notice how it alternates "doesn't" and "just" depending on the subject of the sentence, the ambiguous "it" and "this"). There are some bright spots: "You're looking good / in spite of the light," ever an anticlimactic thing to say.

I'm still not sure if I like "Television Music Supervisor", though I certainly appreciate it more in these recent listen-throughs. Lyrically, it's not there, except for the verse "The music makes a musical sound / measured in echoes / by famous novelist brothers / Shit Head Number One and Shit Head Number Two". But, to be fair to Bejar, he had been allowing the music, relative to the lyrics, guide him in the last decade, beginning with "Poison Season" and his fondness for that band. One could look at the track as a play into "Wilco-nomics", or, really, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-isms, where the synths are meant to convey a mood more than an idea. It adds onto the album's theme that there are some things that really can't be said, as much as Bejar tries to mangle words together.

Ah, "The Raven", my favorite, the first song where the narrator's perspective finally congeals. That "Just look at the world around you; actually, no, don't look," has almost the same embarrassment as seeing your ex walking down the street. If Bejar is really referencing Poe's "The Raven", our singer, just as the protagonist of the same poem, is weighed down by the presence of death and its cause, age. There's a brief moment, as in "Kaputt", where he accesses his youth again, but, unlike that earlier album, he's unable to dwell on it, the past is not an opiate to him. Thus the refrain, "That's what I'll write about, when I write about The Raven"; the camera returns back to his current, living life.

"Cue Synthesizer" is the other song I used to skip and admire now. In a way, some of Destroyer's discography consists of "stupid" songs, or, rather, "unthinking" songs. "Song For America" is a great example, which has the deflated line, "Punks kick a ball, in a park, on a sunday, / strung out in the rain." Does it mean anything? No. He's happy to capture a specific moment of profound un-profoundity, half-ranting half-muttering through his irritation. Take the absurd line, "I look around the room, we are a room of pit ponies"; just when you feel he's going absolutely nowhere with his metaphor, he interjects, "Cue synthesizer", almost as if to shrug away the futile attempt at poetry.

This relationship with "Kaputt" and "Poison Season" is fascinating, and can be further observed in "University Hill". It's a romantic song, but not overly so. Where, in the latter two, there is a hunger, even a desperation to live in fantasy, if only briefly, the songs of "Have We Met" only half-heartedly try to grasp at make-believe. Bejar croons, "And when they come, / to round us up, / to gather us up, / shadow and air, / I'll think of you, standing there, / lovely in the light"; following quickly with the doubt, "But pretty as a picture is halfway there, / a fortress of solitude's no contest / when you stare at oblivion," because he cannot, for whatever reason, come to enjoy the image, really believe in it. There is no anger in his tone; there's only resignation. So the sigh: "Used to be such a thrill."

Let's set aside "The Man in Black's Blues", which is a direct representation of the themes we're discussing at the moment (though there is that very funny line, "Knock, knock, did you say who you come for?", undermining the sadness a little bit), and head to "Foolssong", the only bit of indulgence the singer allows himself and may be one of the more overtly tender songs in Destroyer's discography. The warmth of that opening synth lays his feelings out plainly. Let's highlight that amazingly hilarious verse: "Shall I cancel the play? / What, three showings a day? / It was shitty, we couldn't stay longer." And that "painting known as A Girl And Her Broom" has echoes of the melancholy of the solitary figure in "Girl in a Sling" of "Poison Season". The singer ends with the refrain, "It ain't easy being a baby like you, / it ain't easy being a baby like me," reiterating the album's themes of the self, talking to oneself, reflecting on oneself, holding oneself ironically in times of solitude. What a lovely song! one thinks, and does not expect one-and-a-half minutes of Wilco-esque noise, of voices echoing from the void and leaving, a literal sound and fury, meaning nothing. Since Destroyer has always approached the music with a sense of humor, one wonders whether it's a prank or whether it has meaning, a kind of wink and nod that silence does not mean the end, there is, indeed, no end. It could be Bejar's last shrug: this little bit of sentimentality, too, cannot be taken as fully genuine.

In hindsight the album coheres terribly, which fact I think this review paints well, but, as "Television Music Supervisor" and "Foolssong" indicate, one of the album's theme is, indeed, chaos, or lack of control. There is not so much a sketch of a character here as the singer is just, well, Bejar coming to terms with age in the oddly-introspective yeat of 2020. We can with mirth compare it to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" in terms of how close to the artist it actually is, though, where "Blue" is an exercise in Joni's sincerity, "Have We Met" is an exercise in Bejar's sincerity about being insincere. It's very odd.

You know, I will say this about "Have We Met": I was in a better mood to listen to it when I was depressed. I was in a streak of feeling pretty content and not wanting to listen to "Have We Met", and, now that I'm bummed out, as I'm writing this, I'm swooned by the album. Bejar really has that same quality as Morrissey: he possesses that delicious sigh that comes from knowing our flaws and making fun of them. Destroyer, for me, is comfort food; it's an ongoing commentary on creativity and being ironic about it.

I think, for this reason, I'm going to call "Have We Met" my favorite album of 2020. This is the real reason why I wrote this up. I had said it was Tashi Dorji's "Stateless", and I feel reluctant passing over that album so influenced by the blues. But I've listened to "Have We Met" so. Many. Times. I'm still skeptical of Destroyer's post-"Kaputt" fame and it still feels weird for me to pick the same band twice, but it all harkens to that beginning: Destroyer is kind of a feel, man. So here's to another decade of Destroyer, and here's to another decade of underestimating them, because I do not like "Labyrinthitis" at all.