All fake-English-accent and theatrical sneer, Daniel Bejar's voice is
a hard thing to get over; his self-described "over-the-top, totally
anthemic, voice-of-a-generation David Bowie-styled delivery" is not
the kind of crooning you regularly cop in that musical world some
idiot named "indie-rock." Yet getting over it — Bejar's voice
— is a necessary step in appreciating his increasingly
impressive discographical Destroyer lineage, which keeps getting more
glittering by the LP, with Your Blues the sixth such salvo in
an ongoing artistic assault that's lasted eight years thus far. The
voice-of-a-generationisms probably reached their peak on the
glamorama action of 1999's Thief, three records into this
whole Destroyer thing, it being the first time Bejar really went
balls-out for broke with a full band and big-ass orchestrations and
all. That's not to say that the high-wire heights of 2001's
Streethawk: A Seduction didn't find him thin-white-duking his
way through florid flourishes of baroque instrumentage and Bejar's
beloved airplane-hangar reverb, but by then such vocal stylin' was
less about implied anthemicism and more about what his singing was
actually singing. Whilst you have to get over Bejar's voice —
its tone, its mode of delivery, its deference and reverence to past
pop-cultural times — to really be able to start seeing
Destroyer's artistry for what it is, it's still Bejar's voice —
its intonations, its lyrical phrasing, its vicious words — that
remains at the core of Destroyer's artistry. Your Blues
presents Bejar's singing in possibly the most "straight" setting it's
been afforded since back in his four-trackin' salad days, the
stripped-down synth symphonies seen here seeming like a rebellion
against the last Destroyer disc, 2002's This Night. That album
can seem like both the best and worst Destroyer disc at once, the
operatic epic a mess of tangled-up guitars whose free-ranging sprawl
of stadium-sized gestures almost seems an attempt to mate the glam
strut of T-Rex with the outsider folk of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Ditching
any trace of electric guitars, Your Blues occasionally sets a
song to a soft acoustic strum, but more often assembles songs solely
on synths, with any intermittent beat-keeping coming from shaken hand
percussion. Whilst Bejar's songs are blessed with mucho rhythm and
melody, you should still be made aware that there's no real beat, no
real bass, and little that sounds organic. Yet there's still
something quite regal and symphonic about it all, the synthesized
strings and horns and piano stirring up a romanticism that goes with
Bejar's fancy-pants lyricism. And there are moments when Bejar and
his current cohorts (as of this disc: David Carswell and John
Collins) nail the most amazing keytone, as in the album's two
standout tracks, "Notorious Lightning" and "Mad Foxes," both built
from ersatz tones into tunes of erected artifice, such grandiose
stature glittering with the shiniest of synthetic sound.
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