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Wall Street Journal

‘Dan's Boogie' Review: Destroyer's Songwriting Stays Sharp

Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Bejar has been sharing thoughts about the world outside his window for 30 years. Early on as the frontman of Destroyer, which oscillates between a solo project and a band, he wrote songs that touched on the Vancouver music scene, politics and the perils of romance, spicing up his stories with literary and musical allusions and quirky diction. As he's aged, Mr. Bejar's wry observations have grown broader, and details from his life often serve as punchlines to his setups. He's found a comfortable place as an indie-rock institution. His audience is modest but loyal, and they love hearing from him on new records every couple of years. Mr. Bejar's songwriting voice is specific to him and doesn't change much from one LP to the next—he strings one funny line after another about the people and places he encounters, and these lines almost magically assemble into complete statements that are both clever and touching. What varies is Destroyer's musical setting. Early on, the project was rooted in folk, with Mr. Bejar frequently delivering his lyrics over acoustic guitars. More recently, he's experimented with a sax-driven ambience that dances between early-'80s yacht rock and the new romantic balladeers who followed in the wake of Roxy Music. The title of the new Destroyer album 'Dan's Boogie' (Merge), out Friday, is characteristically self-referential and suggests we could be in for a bluesy, hip-shaking record. But this time, Mr. Bejar opts for a survey of favored styles from the past, while his writing remains as sharp as ever. The fake-out of the title sets the stage for an album that creates expectations and then subverts them. Once again working with producer and multi-instrumentalist John Collins, Mr. Bejar indulges his fascination with artifice, experimenting with how a song's arrangement can convey gnawing disappointment and puncture pretension with wit. 'The Same Thing as Nothing at All' opens like a rapidly rising curtain, as a wall of synthesized strings and horns delivers a cheap, knock-off version of grandeur. The singer's voice is processed to sound like it's echoing upward from the bottom of a well, and he sounds exhausted and slightly irritated as he delivers lines like 'The chandelier struggles to light / Up the night.' The following 'Hydroplaning off the Edge of the World' is a huge, electrifying buzz of a song, with 'ba-di-ba' backing vocals and a rush of synth drone. It's an oddly catchy and even hypnotic number that instantly ranks with Mr. Bejar's finest creations. He delivers a cluster of images and sensations detailing a world that's gone mad—as he wanders the streets, he encounters a priest who mistakes him for a fellow man of the cloth, and then bumps into someone who wonders if Mr. Bejar might be a professional basketball player. Such cases of mistaken identity are common in his music, where all and sundry are trying desperately to know themselves and figure out their place in the universe.