Ever play the Destroyer drinking game? The rules — found on the
wires of the nerds — instruct the Destroyer fan to play an album, then
take a drink when (amongst many things) there's mention of a
previous album or song title, recycling or referring to lyrics of
another Destroyer song, reference to or appropriation of lyrics from
a song by someone else, mention of another band or musician,
reference to or attack on the music scene/industry, reference to
visual art or artists, mention of a specific year or century, or a
character in a song quoted within the lyrics.
That the fans
continue to slug one with every mention of East Van or every time a
guitar solo and vocal la-la-las mirror each other is not, however, a
testament to the ridiculous levels of fandom the internerd inspires.
What these fabulously labyrinthine quotations and references and
in-references really reveal is the incredibly intricate musical world
authored by Daniel Bejar over seven records as Destroyer.
Often
unfairly maligned throughout his time — in particular, in his
Streethawk: A Seduction era, as some sort of blind Bowie acolyte —
Bejar has finally, with Destroyer's Rubies, made an album to silence
those who'd doubt his artistic worth, this seventh longplayer rather
resembling the definitive Destroyer disc. Not to mention the album
to get his most fanatical fans completely maggotted.
Like, simply this verse — "Look to the West!/ 'Ah, look, it's no
contest' Proud Mary said as she lit the fuse./ 'I wanted you, I
wanted your blues.'/ Your Blues" — from the album's titular
nine-minute opening-gambit is enough to have those in the
lyrical-referencing know vomiting behind the bean-bag. But hearing
Bejar weave such referential/self-referential/self-reverential
threads together in such a tight true love knot, and hearing him do
this amongst a hot-shit set of songs in which his particular
peculiarities — literary lyrical texts, hysterical falsetto-ing, camp
piano, searing guitar solos — have never sounded better, nor more
focused, nor more alive, nor more so utterly on fire — well, it's
almost akin to watching Wong Kar-Wai's "2046," where the Hong Kong
auteur makes a movie that serves as an "overview" to his dense,
interconnected, shape-shifting filmography. Here, Bejar achieves
that similar feeling: this is the master to which his other albums can
be referenced back, the masterwork of a master artist.
It's
hard to take the comparison too far — although I'm sure you could
mount some case for Bejar as Wong, with his rock 'n' roll pseudonym
Destroyer playing the same writer's proxy as Tony Leung Chiu-Wai does
in Wong's pictures — given the differing artistic barrows they push,
but it's a comparison that can be taken far enough, both being
artists whose bodies of work feel like a sustained whole, whose
singular works make references to other works/ideas/characters within
the sustained whole, and whose improvisational artistry feels, for
all the confusion it causes to "outsiders," like variations on the
same theme.
Given the musical left turns Bejar artfully executed on his last two
longplayers — the dense, dark, electric-guitar-addled tangle of 2002's
This Night and the minimalist synth-symphonies of 2004's Your
Blues —
it's strange to paint him as some sort of focused artist, obsessed by
motifs, ideas, colors, styles. Yet, there are such constants — his
obsession with painters, for example, which stitches three straight
songs ("Your Blood," "European Oils," "Looter's Follies") together early on
Rubies — in his work that those who've soaked in enough Destroyer
albums to be able to play that Destroyer drinking game would find it
impossible not to see his output as coming from the same place,
almost a singular meditation on the ideas that have forever driven
him. If the arrangements on an album stand out from the other marks
in his discography, it's best to think of it as a phase: Your Blues,
Bejar's Blue Period.
Rubies returns to the color/form that marked
Bejar's "mid period" of 2000's Thief and 2001's Streethawk: A
Seduction, formative albums that, whilst lacking the consistency and
conviction of his efforts for Merge, were the works in which the
artist's unique aesthetic started to take true artistic shape. Yet,
after a few years working with different musical media, here Bejar
comes back to the purity of his artistry with renewed intention and
focus, Rubies being not just the master of his universe due to the fact
that its lyrics reference both Your Blues and This Night in
several separate songs, and not just because its multiple references
also take in "Union Street," "The Scene," and "The American
Underground," and not just because we get given Mary and Ruby and
Christine and Candice and Molly to join Holly and Madeleine and
Melanie and Jennifer in his unending litany of lyrical
women.
This is the defining Destroyer work because of its size and scope,
because of its melodicism ("Painter in Your Pocket" the hottest
pop song Bejar's authored yet), because of the caliber of its musical
chops, and because of the shots Bejar continues to fire. Whilst we
may parallel drunks or filmmakers or painters in painting a portrait
of the artist, Bejar is very much a musician, and his career has
almost been one long, iconoclastic revolt: against the narrow notions
of what being a musician may mean as we've turned the corner into the
21st century, and against the indie conventions that get applied to a
guy playing in the New Pornographers. (Drink muchly as he sings
on the song "City of Daughters," found on Thief, not on
City of Daughters: "Once again you have refused the New
Pornographies.") Bejar has long fought for his right to make big,
bold, near-ridiculous records sung in over-the-top, anthemic,
voice-of-a-generation Bowie-isms; has long fought to maintain a sense
of artistic independence; has long fought for art over commerce; has
long tried to fight off the inevitability of sublimation hour, when
someone finally writes a cheque big enough to match his price, and
stifle the bluster of this heavy-metal-monikered songsmith's lyrical
mettle. Whilst it's another battle in this war, Destroyer's Rubies, as
Bejar's
definitive disc, could be the one that finally has
people trying to coerce him with cash; could be the album to take him
from the realms of fanatical fandom and into the fanciful land of the
crossover.
It could be, but I'd doubt it. Despite all the album's
joys, such a success story doesn't go with the tale this
storyteller's long been penning; he's a perpetual rogue on the
perpetual road to cult-like obscurity, this slow march being not a journey
for the weary, but for those fans wholly under the sway of this
minstrel. So, if you're fan enough to have read this far: have
another drink. Drink of the Christmas wines like it's April 27th and
you've a Diamond Monger's thirst. And drink some more.
|
