It’s appropriate that the kids on the Merge records forums have created a drinking game based around Destroyer records (drink when Dan swears, drink when he references another Destroyer album or song, drink when he talks smack on a character in a song, you get the idea). Dan Bejar seems like a dude who probably likes to put one down, and Destroyer is just plain good drinking music anyway. Lazy, half-assed sounding guitar parts, tossed-off lyrical couplets whose brilliance is partially the fault of their casual poetry, and a general I-don’t-quite-give-a-shit attitude evoke the party-time throwaway sound of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes...just with a lot more cynicism and casual F-bombs.
Destroyer’s Rubies is no exception, but it is so far an exception in my listening experience with the band. I tend to get bored on Bejar’s records. The grins and chuckles elicited by his singular way with words isn’t always enough to make it work for me. But this one had me from the get-go, from the latter-day Lou Reed hurry-up-and-wait phrasing on “Rubies” to the sort of extended jam on “The Priest Who Learned to Last Forever,” the only part that really drags at all.
Has he learned a thing or two about hooks since becoming a New Pornographer? Possibly, though these tunes aren’t as overtly catchy as his work with that gang. They have all the classic Destroyer ingredients, including the miles and miles of “la la la” passages in three-fourths of the songs here, and nothing seems very deliberate, but of course, that’s the game. It’s focused in its Destroyer-ness, and if I had to give someone a record to introduce them — a Bejar statement of purpose — this would probably be it. It’s not terribly dense, it’s not weird and full of synths like Your Blues. It just kind of does what it’s supposed to, and very well.
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