Destroyer reinvents itself once again and asks Have We Met
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2020 19:00:16 +0000
When: March 20, 8 p.m.
Where: Vogue Theatre
Tickets and info: $29.50 at eventbrite.ca
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 stuck inside hospital corridors — Crimson Tide by Destroyer
The new Destroyer album Have We Met opens with frontman/founder Dan Bejar quietly reciting those despondent lyrics from Crimson Tide. The meditative, even ragged, wording is backed by sparse washes of reverberating keyboard and guitar.
When it winds down six minutes later, the track is a slick funky dance beat, brimming with swaggering self-assurance.
Twelve albums in, Bejar has once again turned assumptions inside out to produce immediately memorable music. The Vancouver musician has been doing it since 1995 with increasingly lush sounding records. Have We Met takes the polish of 2015’s Poison Season and 2017’s ken and imbues the music with a deep sense of groove.
Bejar says that he never looks for continuity or consistency from album to album. Producer John Collins (The New Pornographers, The Evaporators) really put his personal stamp on Have We Met, which is both bouncy and synth-heavy.
“John is someone I’ve worked with for over 23 years, right down to the first time I went in to a studio to record City of Daughters and JC/DC studios was in the basement of a house in Ambleside in West Van,” said Bejar.
“So recording with him is pretty familiar, and having Nick (Bragg, guitar) lay stuff all over it is too. We began basically just playing around, and then it emerged that it was going to be a digital record constructed on computers and — sort of — worked on in semi-isolation.”
That sense of solitary creation goes a long way to explaining how the vocals reign over top of songs ranging from the pulsing It Just Doesn’t Happen to heralding the “idiot’s dissonant roar” in Cue Synthesizer. Almost always, the beats kick in at some point.
“We spent a lot of time working on arrangements, which comes really naturally to John, as someone who mixes and combines seemingly disparate instruments and parts,” said Bejar.
“It all came out pretty groovy, in an industrial pop kind of way.”
Have We Met also includes some lengthy instrumental sections with a decidedly textural bent.
The title track is an instrumental. The final few minutes of the closing song foolssong is an ambient fade out. As to whether Bejar has ever bandied about releasing an ambient album, the answer is a firm no.
“Foolssong is actually one of the closest songs to the original recorded arrangement, until this two minute thing entirely of John’s creation wound up getting tagged to the end,” he said.
“We had to look at each other at some point and decide if that was really the last thing on the record people would hear, and the answer was yes. Have We Met was me wanting to have Nick do something to add a musical sigh to what was intended to be a very digital, very claustrophobic, sounding record, and it’s really nice.”
Dan Bejar.
Destroyer songs have been noted for their wordy pros, and Bejar’s love of unexpected pointed vocabulary. He is quoted in a Pitchfork.com interview noting a songwriting rule of his is to: “Sing the least poetic thing you can think of, and try to make it sound beautiful.” This technique actually has the effect of drawing in the listener to hang on every word.
With the familiarity of simple rhyming verse removed, lines in The Raven — Just look at the world around you/Actually, no don’t look/But if you only knew how I cry foul in every hour of every day — sound deeper than they probably are. Regardless of how truly odd so much of the wordplay is, Destroyer’s music is never psychedelic.
In fact, it’s rather philosophical.
“One of the most common things in Destroyer songs is to include retractions, going from stating something really emphatically and then taking a pause to think about it and change your mind,” Bejar said.
“There are often these soft, contemplative bars of music that act as an introduction and then the actual proper verse will start off with that same form and become a rant or a ramble. I really like that form.”
Examples of that on Have We Met include The Television Music Supervisor’s odd tale of misspeaking, or the “me versus them” conceit of Kinda Dark. University Hill is another moody tune that seems to take its name from some well respected Vancouver elementary and secondary schools. Bejar believes he did attend the elementary for a short time, but the name of the pretty and incredibly dark song is purely coincidental.
“At the end, I needed a word to rhyme with thrill and I knew it was going to be something, something hill,” he said.
“Blueberry was taking, Strawberry was dumb, so what was a hill I could sing with any conviction? Then I hit upon university hill and it was a bit weird, and it felt good singing it, so it eventually went on to be the name of the song.”
Sometimes, a song title is just a title. Cue Synthesizer certainly is one.
“I got really into stage direction as a form of writing and I liked the idea of a song built entirely off of imperatives like ‘cue synthesizer’ or ‘bring on the drums’,” he said.
“This kind of ringmaster, theatre director or production wrangler language was both exciting and evil and manipulative. I liked that as I was making a song by describing making it.”
For all the mentions of evil, darkness, claustrophobia and whatnot, Have We Met is not a reflection of its writer’s frame of reference. Bejar insists that he is an upbeat person who merely gravitates to expressing how “amped and jacked up we feel in dark times.”
Destroyer will once again tour as a septet featuring a who’s who of the Canadian indie rock and jazz scenes laying down pristine arrangements while Bejar roams the stage. The bushy-haired vocalist is known for performing without interacting with the crowd, preferring to just let the music do the talking.
Have We Met has been flagged as one of 2020’s most-anticipated releases by media outlets across North America and Europe.
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