Destroyer

Even before The New Pornographers released an album called Twin Cinema, it was tempting to think of Dan Bejar as an auteur. He's got the look down, with his shaggy hair and director's beard. His vision is so specific that it seems almost claustrophobic in a democratic band setting, like it needs to be released into the wild (he is to The New Pornographers what Neil Young was to CSNY). Musically, Bejar's other band Destroyer embraces -- then condemns and then embraces again -- a flair for the theatrical, for the crowd-pleasing. Bejar's storytelling is as often as important to the fabric of his albums as his songwriting, and Destroyer's Rubies offers up some of his best work in both categories. It revives dying visions of the utopian city in which many of us dreamed of living, where arthouse theatres and used record stores thrive and where everyone is friendly and intelligent and, perhaps most importantly, mysterious.

He's not literally a filmmaker, of course, but Bejar gets the listener's internal projection reels rolling nonetheless. This starts immediately, with the nine-minute-plus opening odyssey of "Rubies," so full of twists that it feels like a whole EP in and of itself. Notice is served that the synthesized world of Your Blues has largely been left behind, and with it comes a return to the guitars (and the bandmates) of This Night.

Destroyer have the reputation for being difficult, and it's true that Destroyer's Rubies won't be a record most people would casually toss on while entertaining or relaxing. It's also true that, for all the inventiveness around it, Bejar's highly dramatic, somewhat strangled voice just won't lay right on some ears on some days. But there is eminent accessibility throughout, from the graceful "European Oils" to the indie-rock guitar-a-thon "3000 Flowers." You can unweave the dense lyrics in the verses, or you can just float along with the "la la la" choruses that are a Destroyer staple.

After seven albums, Destroyer are in their own space, but that doesn't discount the parallels with other songwriters. Bejar has Dylan's gift for really biting into certain words, chewing and stretching them, injecting them with wit or malice. On a more contemporary level, but in a very different genre, Cursive's Tim Kasher has also been obsessed with creating art about art, and injects plenty of self-deprecation into his metafictions. Those parallels aren't to say that Destroyer sounds like anyone else, because they don't really. Instead, they're just testaments that Bejar wouldn't be walking alone in that mythical city. -- Adam McKibbin, The Red Alert

Supporters of Destroyer mastermind Dan Bejar have been regaled with enough material over the previous two years to keep even the smallest fan site busy. Between the New Pornographers' 2005 Bejar-heavy Twin Cinema and the Destroyer/Frog Eyes EP Notorious Lightning and Other Works, the hyper-literate, Bowie-loving Canadian has been on a roll. Destroyer's Rubies, his fifth full-length offering, is an amalgam of Streethawk: A Seduction's glam rock posturing, This Night's guitar-heavy psychedelia, and Your Blues' apocalyptic wordplay. Bejar's imagery is as impenetrable and volatile as ever -- "Dueling cyclones jackknife/They got eyes for your wife and the blood that lives in her heart" -- but musically, he's forged a solid enough foundation to ground it. Part of Bejar's charm comes from his innate ability to balance sadistic verse, music geek grandstanding, and bawdy refrains with enough major seventh chords to score a full season of Brady Bunch segues -- "A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point"'s pre-chorus crescendo declares "Those who love Zeppelin will eventually betray Floyd/I cast off those couplets in honor of the void" before exploding into "I pictured heaven on earth made of clay, as your form dictated." Rubies is heavy on pop craft, with standout cuts like "European Oils," "3000 Flowers," and the manic title track echoing 2005's "Broken Breads" and "Streets of Fire," but it's more than just the art-house theater to the Pornographers' Twin Cinema, it's the absinthe-drunk projectionist reveling in the sheer hedonism of it all. ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide