Destroyer
Kaputt: 8
Destroyer has never sat still across his long recording career. From his rough, lo-fi beginnings to the Bowie-isms of Streethawk: A Seduction, from the electronic experiments of Your Blues to the majestic Destroyer’s Rubies, he’s mined new ground on each release, with varying but generally high degrees of success. That trend carries through with Kaputt, one of his strongest albums to date. After the somewhat disappointing (though not bad) Trouble in Dreams, it’s a refreshing return to top form without mining old ground.
The direction Bejar took his sound, however, seems completely baffling on paper. The songs tend to be driven by electronic beats that, in addition to being very simple, sound more cheap than anything else. Savage Night at the Opera is a perfect example, and it even has an equally cheap-sounding synth providing a droning atmosphere in the background. Complementing this is a reliance on lite funk basslines—Savage Night at the Opera is again a prime example, as is the title track. Peppered throughout the album is the sort of schmaltzy sax that peppers 80s radio hits (think Supertramp’s The Logical Song, but cheesier), enough so that it’s safe to say this is Kenny G’s favorite Destroyer album by far.
It doesn’t stop there. Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, another deliberately cheesy album that works, opens with First We Take Manhattan. For the first minute or so, it’s got a stomping 80s beat that’s more awesome than anything else (“first, we take Manhattan… THEN WE TAKE BERLIN”), and then female vocals come in with “I’d really like to live beside you baby,” and the album lays the 80s on thick from there on out. Bejar’s got that, too—check Blue Eyes, Downtown, and Song for America for some samples. The overall aura of the album is soft rock radio fodder that aging dads listen to while driving to the job they don’t like anyway. It’s the music playing hotel lobbies that creates a background noise that everyone proceeds to ignore.
But, it’s not. Despite having a sound that’s impossible to describe without making the album sound inoffensive and boring at best, the album is incredibly deep and rewarding of repeat listening. Every listen so far, I’ve found something new. I’ve identified three key factors that I think make Destroyer’s new direction work so well. First, this is easily Bejar’s most consistent album in terms of both atmosphere and quality. While Streethawk and Destroyer’s Rubies don’t have any songs I dislike, they have a few that are just OK. Here, I actively like every song, and love quite a few. Moreover, Bejar maintains a consistent sound across the entire album, giving it a greater sense of cohesion than any prior Destroyer album (not they feel roughshod at all). The only slight exception is Bay of Pigs, the closer. It was released in 2009, and so is likely older than the rest of the album, but while it lacks the lite funk and smooth jazz elements, it still fits. It also happens to be an incredible closer and perhaps Bejar’s best song to date, so I can’t complain about its inclusion.
A consistent atmosphere alone, however, does not suffice to make a great album, and doesn’t explain how Bejar makes the unseemly musical building blocks that make up Kaputt fit together into something great. The other two factors go hand in hand: Bejar’s great melodic sense is in top form here, and his cryptic, self-referential lyrics are as fascinating as ever. These two elements are the main constants across all of his albums, making each album feel like a Destroyer album even as the sound changes, and that’s true of Kaputt as well.
They work together beautifully on Kaputt, as Bejar contributes both some of his most beautiful melodies and some of his most moving lyrics. I discussed Savage Night at the Opera a fair bit earlier when describing the album’s sound, because it epitomizes the album’s sound. On the flip side, it’s also one of the prettiest songs here, especially when Bejar starts cooing a gorgeous wordless melody. It’s one of the album’s more upfront songs, and the quieter, slower songs like Blue Eyes and Song for America are even more beautiful.
The centerpiece of the album is Suicide Demo for Kara Walker, a song that lives up to its title as one of the saddest Destroyer songs. Bejar stretches it out over eight minutes, incorporating all of the musical elements discussed earlier. From the opening line, “Brown paper bag, don’t stop me now, I’m on a roll,” the surface corniness of the music completely drops away. It’s the clearest example of a clean, slick surface being little more than a façade hiding the troubles described in the lyrics. What’s most impressive, however, isn’t that there’s some music hiding behind that façade, some hidden detail that the lyrics bring out. The cheap electronics, lite funk, schmaltzy sax, and so on are themselves commandeered for Bejar’s purposes: they become genuinely moving.
Take it all together, and it adds up to an incredibly strong album. Because Bejar changes his sound with every album, it’s hard to rank his best albums, but Kaputt is certainly up near the top. On a more useful level of criticism, it clearly succeeds at everything it tries to do, giving the world one more Destroyer album worth getting to know deeply, without looking at all redundant next to his past triumphs.
awesome review aaron