When faced with the struggles of the world and the lack of solutions concerning its desolate state, what can one do to respond with both poignancy and creativity? Well, when you are Dan Bejar (a solo artist by trade who became involved in the Vancouver pop super ground The New Pornographers in the late 90’s) you rise from your bed and attempt to describe a generations worth of apathy and hedonism through fantasy rock conglomerations and puzzlingly memorable lyrics, and then call the resulting product Streethawk: A Seduction.
An album that evokes spirits from 60’s psychedelia as much as it pays its respects to the likes of David Bowie, Lou Reed and T-Rex, Streethawk combines playful lyrics (“…so many things happen through me, the alter boys they just wanna do me and that’s fine, you gotta have faith”, croons Bejar in ‘English Music’) with heart wrenching testaments to the state of the world at large (‘The Very Modern Dance’ leaves us chanting “…and another west coast morning, fuck it, I’m warning/you can look you can touch but no not that much/ whats one more police action when I’m canceling the truce again”). Bejar’s arrangements leave a four course meal’s worth of tastes in our mouths spanning from jagged guitar intervals to strange salsa-esque escapades. His singing is more of an interjection than a flowing melody, giving new meaning to word play and what defines a lead singer.
Streethawk works more as a collection of singles than an actual album, which may be its only real drawback. The songs rarely flow well into one another and it seems as though the ideas behind them are not cohesive at times. These are pieces that are put together in such a way that they split into so many different directions that one could conclude that Bejar couldn’t decide on which concept to follow. This, as a criticism, is miniscule when it comes to the strength of each individual track for, you see, all of these cuts can easily stand on their own even if they don’t necessarily operate well in the structure of an album.
Destroyer comes across as a full band capable of presenting music in many different ways. Dan Bejar’s arrangements are both quizzical and earnest spinning tales of romantic deception and governmental pitfalls with a certain ease that makes these songs sheepishly rebellious as well as profoundly outspoken. Streethawk: A Seduction revels in its own cleverness generating a full frontal operation out of soothingly twisted messages of worship and nihilism that can only exist together through the linking mechanism of Bejar’s hopelessness and his bands inability to accept the idea of a world without hope. |