Trouble In Dreams - Destroyer Album Review
Destroyer
Album Review
Eleven songs: one fabulous album.
This reviewer's great joy is stumbling on something new and different - Trouble In Dreams is just that.
Prolific Canadian writer Dan Bejar has lots going on, musically. This is the 8th Destroyer album in 12 years. Quite remarkable considering this is regarded as a side-project. It's also my first Bejar encounter, and frankly, I'm loving it. It's so refreshing and it's very unusual in many ways, which means it probably won't enter the mainstream charts. Bejar's singing is quirky, almost childlike (he's 36 by the way) mixed with a hint of Bowie, featured on the ridiculously silly and bombastic Plaza Trinidad. Musically he wanders across genre's which is apart of its charm. There'll be moments when you wonder...where's he going now? It really doesn't matter. Just take it all in and enjoy the ride. There are profound moments of beauty on offer like the folkie-pop orientated Blue Flower/Blue Flame which isn't to dissimilar to Devendra Banhart's alt-folk template. It's a neat lead -in song despite the wacky lyrics: " Okay, fine, even the sky looks like wine, and everywhere I turn there's a new face in town stuck inside the well - fresh hell to attend to.." for example. Pumping-up the pace and intensity Dark Leaves...is joyous to the extreme, pulsating beats and jangly guitar solos aplenty with buckets of melody. Switching code in a flash, The State, a crunchy Blues tinged rocker with loads of lazy wiry solos is clever stuff indeed with Shooting Rockets, crammed with as many lyrics as possible again shows his lyrical and surreal flight of fancy and turns out to be a monster of a track, supported by a muddy production and drenched in wailing solos - sublime. Introducing Angels is a gorgeous sounding song. Lyrically it's the shortest song here, and again a bit, well, off kilter, and so are the bonkers River and Leopard Of Honor, but yet again the music fits perfectly with the lyrics. Hippy-like Libby's First Sunrise, (yep, he couldn't avoid some handclapping) is a rambling beauty, full of gorgeous melody and swirling strings that rounds-off a real beauty, but not in the conventional way.
File under: Suck it and see - it's really good.
