Decoding Destroyer

Prolific singer-songwriter Dan Bejar, whose band Destroyer have just released their eighth full-length record in a decade. (Merge Records)

The other day, I had my iPod on shuffle, and in the impossibly serendipitous way that iPods can work, the following cycle of songs emerged: Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man (covered by former Pavement frontman Steven Malkmus), T. Rex’s Raw Ramp, Guided by Voices’ Shocker in Gloomtown, the New Pornographers’ Entering White Cecilia, Swan Lake’s Widow’s Walk and Destroyer’s Foam Hands.

To the uninitiated, such a grouping of songs might mean squat; but to any fan of Vancouver-based singer-songwriter Dan Bejar, this accidental playlist was almost supernatural. (Guided by voices, indeed.)

The first three songs were a kind of partial DNA match: all of these musicians had influenced Bejar to some degree (with a nice two-for-one in the Dylan/Malkmus combo). And the last three represented a shorthand CV: Bejar’s long been a member of Vancouver indie rockers the New Pornographers (though he rarely tours with them); Swan Lake is another, less mainstream “supergroup” that he formed with Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug and Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer; and Destroyer is Bejar’s “solo” project and main gig, a post-ironic rock band that slyly skips across genres (glam, prog, electronica, psychedelia) while packing its songs with a PhD’s passel of musical and literary references. This month, Destroyer releases Trouble in Dreams, its eighth full-length record in a decade.

Destroyer began life as an acoustic home-recording project in the early '90s. (Much has been written about the band’s name, but suffice it to say that it has nothing to do with Kiss.) Bejar’s lyrical voice seemed fully formed from the beginning, on albums like City of Daughters and Streethawk: A Seduction. It was barnacled with enigmatic wordplay, plangent romanticism and a political sensibility rarely heard in alternative music. His singing voice was just as distinctive — a giddy, goofy bark or yelp, both histrionic and hysterical, and not to all tastes, certainly. (Imagine a kind of Lou Reed-David Bowie mash-up.) If Celine Dion literally stops talking for days in order to preserve her voice, Bejar might achieve the weird warp of his instrument by heckling mediocre spoken-word poets.

(Merge Records)

Destroyer’s last outing, Destroyer’s Rubies, had the feel of a breakthrough, both in its perfection of Bejar’s voice and as a full-tilt, anthemic rock album. “Rubies is a pretty confident record,” Bejar says via e-mail from Vancouver. “I knew I’d stumbled into a writing style and a singing style to go with it that felt very specific to me.” All of Destroyer’s individual albums have a call-and-response relationship to Bejar’s entire oeuvre, and the theatrical, expansive Trouble in Dreams picks up exactly where the orchestral Rubies left off. “I think that Trouble in Dreams seems more epic, larger,” Bejar says. “The playing more ferocious, voluminous. If anyone sees us live, they’ll know immediately what I speak of.”

On the last couple of Destroyer albums, Bejar’s collaborators have become increasingly integral to the band’s sound. Destroyer has always seemed like a solo act — an impression enhanced by albums like Your Blues, where Bejar replaced his rhythm section with two MIDI synthesizers — but for someone so defiantly iconoclastic he’s quite willing to work with musicians as strong-willed as himself. (In addition to the aforementioned joint projects, Bejar’s also recently released an album of songs he recorded with his longtime girlfriend, artist Sydney Vermont, under the name Hello, Blue Roses.) Rubies’ accomplished players — including guitarist Nicholas Bragg and keyboardist Ted Bois, both of various Vancouver bands — made it, according to Bejar, “real easy for me to regard or disregard traditional melodic singing as the mood struck me.” On Trouble in Dreams, he’s reunited with that same formidable group, minus drummer Scott Morgan.

As far as I know, Destroyer is the only Canadian group to spawn a drinking game, a fan-edited Wiki, and an online lyric generator. All three of these things hint at Bejar’s literary pretensions. Destroyer’s entire discography feels like a multi-part, unified and self-contained fictive world, with recurring characters, themes and lyrical refrains. But it’s less rock opera than rock epic poem — a glammy, sardonic Nibelungenlied. Decoding the Destroyer cosmology, however, would tax the talents of any litterateur. Its litany of female names (Christine, Nicole, Helena, etc.) might make Leonard Cohen light-headed; there are constant, punning allusions to royalty, seasons and bodies of water; political systems are debunked, as well as the revolutionaries that threaten them.

It’s a typical Bejar strategy to spit out a motif and then undermine it, often in the same breath. It can occasionally feel like he doesn’t believe what he’s singing, or he’s daring you to believe it, or he’s wondering aloud why anyone would even want to “believe” a song lyric in the first place. (A sample from the new record: “Blue flower/blue flame/A woman by another name is not a woman/I’ll tell you what I mean by that/Maybe not in seconds flat, maybe not today.”) But it doesn’t take long to figure out that Bejar’s affection for these gnomic word-clusters has less to do with their meaning than with their sonic and rhythmic function. Which is not to say that he doesn’t exactly mean things, just that he doesn’t mean things exactly. Bejar himself calls the Destroyer universe simply “a catalogue of the stuff I think about.”

(Merge Records)

In interviews, Bejar can seem overly earnest and exhausted, a magician tired of being asked to explain his tricks. (Misdirection’s his middle name.) Mentioning the intertextuality of his work elicits this weary response: “It’s just a misunderstanding of what I do, and a way to deflect any real conversation about lyric and melody and rhythm and diction and tone, which is a conversation that doesn’t really exist when discussing ‘songs’ in mainstream critical writing.” Later, when asked about the Russian and Spanish poets whose work informs Trouble in Dreams, he refuses to name names, insisting — jokingly? — that he’s saving them for “an essay he’s working on.”

On the scale of musical misanthropes, Bejar might sit somewhere between Scott Walker and The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, groundbreaking artists renowned for their antagonistic relationship towards the industry they work in (or near, or around). Bejar’s lyrics famously give the music business the business — and the press the slip — and the threat of alienating his fan base is a perpetual one. (Your Blues was like a pocket-sized parody of Dylan going electric.) “I’m not always a terribly confident performer,” Bejar says, “in that I don’t desire to entertain anyone, so I’m not always sure what the hell it is I’m actually doing. Though if things are sounding good to me I get really, really into it.”

What this enemy of entertainment is doing, of course, is exactly what he wants. If there’s one constant to Destroyer’s records — other than the presence of Bejar and the “catalogue of stuff he thinks about” — it’s Bejar’s relentless desire to please himself first and foremost, the music lovers (as the title of one Destroyer ditty goes) be damned. That might be the secret to any good art — or at least good poetry, whose pleasure can partly reside in unfathomable nouns and names, in half-recognized allusions, in the groping attempt to decipher someone else’s troubled dreams. If we’re lucky, maybe that will be the subject of Bejar’s essay.

Trouble in Dreams is in stores now.

Jason McBride writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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