Destroyer

“Put some fucking sauce on it.” The words of Adam Granduciel, frontman of Philly-based Americana outfit the War on Drugs, directed towards the soundman at Lee’s Palace. The funniest thing about that statement—besides the fact that he sounded genuinely pissed-off and that I later read a review of another stop on the tour which cited another rift with another soundman—is that there was already so much delay on the mic (assuming that’s what he meant by “sauce,” perhaps even the soundman didn’t know, and was standing at the back of the venue desperately trying to find his Tom Petty dictionary) that the words echoed around the room like someone drunk on the power of vocal effects, commanding the man at the panel to boost the dial up past safe levels.

By contrast, early into Destroyer’s set, Dan Bejar stops singing after the opening few lines of a song and squints out past the crowd. “What’s the soundman trying to tell me? What? Oh, I thought you were making a cutting motion. No? Ok, I’m hallucinating. We’re semi-pro here.” All in a voice which is meek but with so slight a hint of condescension that I still can’t be sure I’m not projecting. For the encore they played “Bay of Pigs” and Bejar mumbled through part of the song, then had to consult a lyric sheet, despite several devoted fans in the front row trying to help him out.

Just because music exudes effortlessness and casual affirmation (or dismissal) of the world doesn’t mean the creators behind it do, is the point. But with Bejar, I suspect there’s very little of his life that isn’t filtered in some kaleidoscopic way through his music, or perhaps more accurately, vice-versa. Which isn’t saying that he really spends all his nights chasing cocaine through the backrooms of the world, but that as some kind of semi-popular musician he feels like he has no choice but to address that mythos, his songs constantly coming to terms with their own existence and some imagined reception before they’re even released into the world. It continually surprises me that he manages to release music as regularly as he does, how much every line he writes seems to have overcome the most relentless kind of stasis to get to its place in the song, almost suffocatingly so at times. The most revealing moment in his career came with the recent collaboration with Loscil, “The Making of Grief Point,” an honest reflection of an artist without the usual coy wordplay of most of his music, the stunning, almost perverse (“It condemns the world at such an easy pace”) demonstration of how an artist always gains and loses more from his work than the audience.

But with Kaputt, Destroyer reached a different level. No longer forcing the music to conform to his twisted lyrics, Bejar delivers laconic micro-poetry that affirms and dismisses everything and lets the soft rock/smooth jazz backdrop ride it into ecstasy and oblivion. He always claimed he was more interested in what certain words do rather than what they mean, but it never fully made sense until now. Here he makes the most casual ideas seem transcendent, and the most profound poetry seem tossed-off. And he does it all in what, for the first time in his career, actually feels like pop music. I love that video for “Kaputt” because it’s silly and it doesn’t make any sense, but the parts all join together according to a completely convincing logic, just like he manages to seamlessly join ruminations on music criticism with wide-eyed romantic asides.

Live, however, Bejar’s backing band makes the recordings of these songs seem polite and restrained by comparison. Everything is drenched in chorus, the saxophonist and trumpeter (in a privileged place up front on the stage) are given free reign, little distinction can be made between instruments. Sometimes it felt like the whole thing would just collapse in on itself. But Bejar himself is a strange source of gravity: freed from playing any instruments (with the exception of the occasional tambourine, which seemed more for his own benefit than anyone else’s), he paced gently back and forth and delivered his vocals calmly, without any sense of urgency. The story goes that he recorded his vocals while lying on a couch, in which case his consultation of a lyric sheet intermittently throughout the set makes perfect sense.

That’s not to say he’s being flippant, just direct, or the word some reviewers have used in describing Leonard Cohen’s zen-like delivery, measured. Bejar can finally afford to be casual, because the songs speak for themselves so well. “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” was a staggering inclusion late in the set, its intimacy somehow being maintained even with an eight-piece backing band. Walker—who contributed the lyrics on cue cards to be mashed up by Bejar—is an odd match, but it works. Her silhouetted murals of appalling African stereotypes shifts the most shocking imagery into something so light it feels like it could blow away, proudly reducing evil back to its surface. It’s a great fit for an album which is less about America or some kind of contemporary condition than the very absurdity of attempting such a task, which is how Bejar himself has promoted it. America through cinema: in “Chinatown” he defiantly gets the last word on Polanski’s film. Then he reimagines Petula Clark’s “Downtown” as a place where “everything was drowning” but still sounds as in love with the lights as she was. More than ever, Bejar seems to have fallen in love with self-oblivion.

The band didn’t reach very far into the back catalogue, though I suppose with this kind of sonic overload, a clean break was necessary. I could have done without the tracks from Trouble in Dreams (2008), though damn if their inclusion wasn’t some kind of tacit admission that the production choices on Kaputt were far more suitable. I went back and listened to Streethawk: A Seduction (2001), the only other Destroyer album I’m 100% behind, to try and figure out why none of those songs made it into the set-list, then realized that the band is almost invisible on a good portion of that record, as it needed to be at the time. It says a lot about how far he’s come when he can deliver something this potent, then release it into a production style forever associated with hedonism and insularity, without the lyrics losing any of their power. All it needed was some fucking sauce.