For all of the lore that surrounds live rock—the life-changing show, the epic cover, the amps in shambles—at some point we have to admit that going to shows can be just a little tedious. For every band that you’ve seen reinvent itself onstage, send electric shocks through your body and make time stop, there are countless more who simply toil through their set like it was a story they had told hundreds of times before. Sometimes it actually does feel like the music onstage can remake the world, can genuinely communicate with the audience, but too few musicians make anything of that chance. Too often the sound sucks, the band looks bored, the songs sound tired and rehashed; your back hurts, you look at your watch, you think about your cats.
To his credit, Destroyer’s Dan Bejar opted to take a risk on his tour for 2003’s Your Blues. Instead of toting a trailer-load of gear that could have replicated Your Blues’ ornate MIDI string arrangements, he recruited fellow Canadians Frog Eyes to serve as his backing band and charged them with reinventing his salty, baroque pop. The collaboration seems a strange fit: Frog Eyes singer Carey Mercer bellows like Nick Cave as the band kicks out jams fraught with messy, hyper-energetic theatricality. On the other hand, Destroyer’s songs are literate, witty and ironic; they are unashamed of rocking, but never so much that it would muss your hair or upset Bejar’s sophisticated, Bowie-esque posturing. Notorious Lightning and Other Works, the six-song, live-in-studio document of this collaboration, is an uneven, unfocused record, flat in spots and lost-feeling in others. But the tension between Frog Eyes’ chaotic rock and Destroyer’s stately, well-crafted pop produces some glorious moments, moments that live up to the promise of what live rock can be.
The opening track, “Notorious Lightning,” is the most ambitious song on the record and best exemplifies this tension. It opens with Bejar sassily sing-speaking over shards of squirmy, unkempt guitar. As he sneers his way through the verse, the guitars and keyboards gain energy and volume, finally letting rip with a furious rock-out over the chorus as he wails, “no it never works out like you planned it!” with the perfect amount of tortured bravado. The song wobbles on this way for 5 more, occasionally aimless, minutes, constantly threatening to unravel and spill over the edges, but always gathering itself into thick, blistering jolts of energetic rock. “New Ways of Living” and “An Artists Revenge” are equally striking as Frog Eyes unabashedly make spastic messes of Bejar’s palatial arrangements. On “The Music Lovers,” Bejar sings impassioned, full-throated “la’s” as unrestrained keyboards and guitars soar and shriek behind him. All of these performances find Frog Eyes undermining Bejar’s posture of sly remove, making his songs feel rougher and more intimate. The force of the band’s aggressive rumblings pushes Bejar to sing more feverishly and with a bit less cool distance than he seems accustomed; it poses a challenge to his pose of emotional restraint and gives his dandy pronouncements a new found ferocity.
Frog Eyes is not as effective at communicating Bejar’s quieter, less anthemic ideas; on “Don’t Become the Thing You Hated” and “Your Blues,” the band plays as if uncomfortably confined inside Destroyer’s skin, displaying little of their previous restless urgency. These songs lack both the grandeur of the original versions and the energy of Notorious Lightning’s earlier tracks. Despite these missteps, I appreciate what Bejar’s done here; he’s risked the integrity of his own vision and put himself at the mercy of another group of musicians. It is refreshing whenever an artist tries to re-imagine his own music, particularly an artist whose music is as carefully crafted as Destroyer’s. The moments that feel directionless seem worth it to me, the side-effects of a musician testing his own boundaries. Because in its best moments this record captures that ecstatic, blood-thinning rush that can only be found in a rock show; and when, with Frog Eyes frothing and roiling behind him, Bejar cackles, “people say we just didn’t want it enough, ah but we were the music lovers!,” I completely believe him. |