There have been giddy rumblings around the internets these days that
Destroyer’s Rubies just might be Dan Bejar’s breakthrough album – the indierock success that had been promised by critics following the almost flawless
Streethawk: A Seduction, but that was skillfully dodged by Bejar with the equally ‘difficult’
This Night and
Your Blues.
While the album does indeed have the potential to reach the modest levels of success that indierock stardom entails, I would describe it less as a breakthrough than as a greatest hits compilation. Instead of moving along the trajectory set by his last two albums (the logical conclusion of which would clearly have been an acapella interpretation of the Fall back catalogue) Bejar has decided to distill the most successful moments from all of his previous albums, although
Streethawk and
Thief in particular, to make a musical collage instead of a straightforward song by song ‘hits’ compilation.
In some ways,
Rubies is almost a parody of a Destroyer album. As a recent near blindness inducing attempt to literally apply Carl Wilson’s version of the
Destroyer drinking game to the album has proved, it is perhaps the most self-referential, pop-culture appropriating, baaa and daaa chorused, Bejarism-infused, and clichéd Destroyer album yet. The hooks and melodies even quote from earlier Destroyer songs this time.
But it is precisely this distillation of the Destroyer discography that makes this album so great. In my opinion, it’s of less importance that this is a (potential) breakthrough album than it is that it's also a gift to the long-term Destroyer fans.
You know who you are: the ones who defended the sprawling This Night as a cutting parody of rock music wankery; who saw Your Blues as a damning critique of the cheap emotionalism and fake authenticity of the singer-songwriter genre; who secretly wished that Bejar never left the claustrophobic bedroom recordings circa
Ideas for Songs. Deep down, Rubies is what you were secretly hoping for. Nothing is unnecessary, the pop-hooks are pristine, and all without sacrificing the infective lyricism, thematic absurdity, and ever-present critique of Bejar’s own place as singer and songwriter in a largely miniscule corner of the music industry.
Destroyer – Painter in Your Pocket (2006)
Destroyer – Loves of a Gnostic (1998)
I’ve put these songs up as a kind of comparison: the former from Rubies and the latter from 1998’s
City of Daughters. Loves of a Gnostic still stands up on its own as one of the best Destroyer songs, but the difference that is most apparent between these two songs is that Bejar is decidedly more of an authoritative presence in Painter in Your Pocket. No longer the reluctant and embarrassed singer-songwriter, he has taken on the persona of the self-confident rock & roll front-man. Sure, it’s all theatre, but after watching
No Direction Home recently I detected a not-insignificant touch of Dylan in Bejar’s reclusive/drunken performance on the last New Pornographers tour.
[
Destroyer’s Rubies comes out on February 21; you can preorder
here.]
