Spectreview: Destroyer – Have We Met

-LIGHT SLATE BLUE-

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“Clickety click click
The music makes a musical sound
Measured in echoes”

Being a critic’s band is a curse of sorts. Critics are slithery, persnickety cretins who pride themselves on wringing music out of its natural delights for the sake of intellectual discussion, and music that appeals to them can find itself in the crossfire between impossibly high expectations and unhealthy fixations on allegedly virtuous qualities like “restraint” and “variety”.  Destroyer is, of course, nothing if not the critic’s band. A well-read white dude obsessed with meta-commentary on musical minutiae with a voice like Robyn Hitchcock who carries himself like a Bowie disciple? He checks every box. But it goes further than that: the triumph of Destroyer is how Dan Bejar can transcend the ingredients of his formula and produce music that’s witty without being (overly) insufferable, complex without being (overly) pretentious, beautiful without (really any) corniness. Now 25 years into the project, Destroyer has the underground clout to intertwine its self-referentiality with its reverence of external musical history, a trick that Bejar’s attempted since 2011’s Kaputt finally found Bejar in the public consciousness, playing festivals to people who’d rather hear soft sounds than obscure, self-lacerating allusions to cult acts from the 80’s.

What Have We Met does more successfully than any of his albums since is recapture the color and spit of his earlier homegrown projects. While it’s definitely still a product of Kaputt’s garden trellises and smoky lounges, it takes higher risks and it floats in territories hitherto unknown to the project, which is always heartening from what could now be considered a legacy act. Bejar’s quoted focus on “Y2K music” makes sense only in how he’s reshaped the sonics surrounding his wonky, anthemic guitar lines; burbling electronics and archaic synth lines dominate, though they’re nowhere near as stifling as what the album’s first singles might have threatened. Picture Have We Met as a giant white wedding tent, with tracks like the chugging “It Just Doesn’t Happen” and the eye-sewn-shut wink of “Cue Synthesizer” its weight-bearing tentpoles. It’s actually the billowing moments surrounding the singles that provide the real magic. “The Television Music Supervisor” builds to a conciliatory climax cribbed from Phoenix’s “Love Like a Sunset”; “The Raven” is just as disarming, a bright morning vista of melody lines and wet beds of reverb that comes across like a layered snapshot of Destroyer highlights. Even more intriguing are the left turns, like a title track – an atmospheric cross with elements of U2’s “July 4th” and Radiohead’s “Hunting Bears” – that’s beguilingly the album’s only instrumental, or a finale of displaced voice samples that builds to a disconcerting cacophony unlike anything we’ve seen before from Bejar.

That’s not something you could universally claim about his wordplay, though in his defense it’s hard to write twelve albums and not repeat yourself at least a few times. Endless metaphors involving oceans and nights and entrances into empty rooms and singularly monikered women continue to abound, and in rare occasions they can feel just as fatigued and devoid of meaning as they did across 2017’s ken, when amid colorless and sludgy electro-rock workouts Bejar often sounded too tired to care. It might be the new weightless environment or the counterweight of the moment, but he sounds more lively here, his frigid repetitions less prominent than his signature lapses into rapid, charmingly grandiloquent poetry.

As ever, it’s a specific pleasure to dive into a Destroyer record and assess its myriad references, not just in their frequency but in their usage. Indeed, Have We Met as dense as anything since 2002’s Streethawk: A Seduction, but Kaputt’s newfound focus on wasted beauty is equally prevalent here. The best thing about Destroyer’s post-2010 output is that one feels encouraged to pull as much from guilty pleasures, the wrenched harmonics and ersatz sonic decisions, as convoluted allusions to history and current events. What’s more, these tracks often make their mark as journeys, traveling toward some anticipated destination while staying within their arranged boundaries. A track like “Crimson Tide,” for instance, might start inelegantly but moves somewhere else, shifting gears instead of settings, with an ending that read as a logical extension of its world. In other words, it’s obvious Bejar’s put in the work here to make these songs thrive, especially sandwiched against each other.

Why here though? There’s a sense that Have We Met’s self-references go beyond the project’s MO and into curiously straight-faced retrospective. After all, 25 years is a long time to be making music that not a lot of people have listened to. In that light, the album’s spaciousness becomes even more ruminative, its repetitions feel like epiphanies, and its strange twists bear additional weight. Most poignantly, it illuminates another angle of Bejar’s ever-present cantankerousness. That aforementioned cacophony at the end of “foolssong” bubbles up softly as the background dilutes itself, which by extension implies it’s always been there underneath the track’s mollifying thrum. Is it a funhouse facsimile of the wordless choruses Bejar’s recorded across Destroyer’s oeuvre? If it’s intended as self-mockery, it wouldn’t be surprising. Destroyer’s long been celebrated first and foremost by respected critics, but to be a critic’s band is to experience firsthand the abject hollowness of holding that aluminum trophy in your palms.

Recommended for pills and smokes, and rain threatening.