Destroyer :: “Dan’s Boogie”
Photo: David Galloway
Bejar’s Destroyer has conjured instrumentation, sophisticated swells, and prolific poetry for the last thirty years in a world filled with complicated characters and self-prophesied situations. Having first launched the project nearly a decade before his 2006 magnum opus “Destroyer’s Rubies,” Bejar’s perfected process has only grown richer over the years as the multi-instrumentalist desperately dives into the salty subconscious of his main character, the self. Having signed with longtime label Merge Records over two decades ago, Bejar’s follow-up to 2022’s “Labyrinthitis,” “Dan’s Boogie,” is nothing short of a melodic miracle as its voluminous vertebrae unfolds like a miraculous maple leaf during a Canadian spring fever dream. Like Dylan and the late Lou Reed, Bejar’s dynamical deliverance is devastating and atmospherically accurate as the veteran musician unveils, once again, a tender testament to the poetic psyche that we’re not alone in the universe; the ultimate truth remains that no one is looking for us. A sonic statement that Swan dives into the heart, “Dan’s Boogie,” is excitingly ethereal while looming in the lyrical twilight where radiating romance lurks like secondhand smoke in a familiar establishment deep in Vancouver’s vortex.
“There are topics that I’ve always loved — the world erasing itself, decay — that stop being academic and get really real when you get old. If I had a handler, they’d say, ‘ixnay on the age-ay!”
Photo: Nicholas Bragg
Joined by longtime members and steady fixtures Nicolas Bragg, John Collins, Ted Bois, and David Carswell, who make up the all-encompassing world that is Destroyer, a name Bejar reflected in the early to mid-2000s as wanting “to go for a rock 'n' roll name. In our own special way, we're tearing shit apart; you just have to listen very carefully. Musically, I knew it was never going to be a metal band, but I thought lyrically, there were fangs to the music. "I was actually so out of it I didn't know that there was a Kiss record called “Destroyer” because I didn't know anything about Kiss. I still don't know anything about them. I just thought it was a cool rock-and-roll name, and I was kind of blown away that it hadn't been taken already. I was like, 'I have to use this because it's so weird that no one's used it before.” Across the album’s nine tracks of cosmic contemplation, riveting romance, and the soul’s solitary confinement within the sad singing skull breathes this foundational moment in Bejar’s career like nothing he has ever released in the dozen-plus albums that have come before. From the top of the staircase, looking downward into the chilling cascades of the harmonious heart confidently stands a singular man whose frizzy hair of maddening curls casts a sensational shadow across the rusty railing that follows to the bottom. From “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” to the eight-minute mantra “Cataract Time” and back towards the album’s title track, listeners will find structured solace in that the existentialism of everyday life is no match to the expert enlightenment found in the careful crevices of “Dan’s Boogie,” and what it means to be alive.
Photo: Nicholas Bragg
