“Susan,” Dan Bejar sings, “sipping sherry, branded by moonlight’s just a game people are playing tonight. Seriously, terror advances. So…” And with those delicate words of warning minor keys dance some sort of celebration, a paean to loving one another while the world keeps eroding. A soft mountain of synthesizer rises up around Bejar’s craggy voice, which finds its home while groaning amidst the manic drumming and arpeggios, which slide atop one another like so many lizards on a windowpane.
The celebration of the melancholy seems to be the theme of Destroyer’s latest Merge release, from the sometimes-grating exuberance of Bejar’s voice right down to the album’s title. Scattered throughout Trouble in Dreams are moments like the one above (from “Dark Leaves Form a Thread”) that put great stock in being able to make the most of what little grace shines upon you. Though the theme seems ready-made for another epic on par with 2006’s Destroyer’s Rubies, Bejar and Co. instead rely on pocket dramas: theatre-sized composition within a pop framework. There are no tracks like the previous album’s nine-minute opener, “Rubies,” which does a lo-fi swell until Bejar sounds like Bowie with a four-track. Even Bejar’s notoriously wordy lyrics are slightly scaled back, and he has learned how to use his voice—which sometimes takes on the aural quality of an aluminum can being ripped in half – with more restraint and taste.
Bejar’s attempts at pop symphony are widely successful. “My Favourite Year” builds on a frothing bed of e-bowed guitar and surf bass that gives way to some of his most soulful and restrained singing on the record. Elsewhere, on “Foam Hands,” tender synthesized strings push in like Nerf on the edges of a solo that could have been lifted from George Harrison. The mixture of minor chord jazz, spiky guitar leads, and cheap strings that characterize the songs ends up sounding like the P.A. music in heaven’s department store; picture Bob Dylan strolling hand-in-hand with the Spiders from Mars. As on Rubies, David Bowie casts a thin white shadow over the entire record.
That said, it’s hard to listen to Trouble in Dreams without remembering that this is, first and foremost, a Dan Bejar record. Unlike the New Pornographers, with whom Bejar often collaborates, Destroyer stands as a vehicle for his singular voice, be it lyrical or stylistic. Where the other strong personalities in the NP’s (Carl Newman and Neko Case among them) effectively check Bejar’s tendency to take things a bit too far, he has no editor in Destroyer, no one else to answer to. The resulting dominance of his vocal theatricalities tends to overpower the efforts of his more-than-capable band and, more importantly, sometimes squanders the emotional capitol that his stunning arrangements have built up. Bejar’s growling warning to “beware the company you reside in,” for instance, breaks the nostalgic trance of “My Favourite Year,” effectively pulling our hearts out of the best song on the record. And while Bejar’s lyrics are often the same slant-toned nonsense that Isaac Brock made famous with Modest Mouse (and I absolutely mean that as a compliment), his tendency to over-articulate the words themselves pushes the music frighteningly close to that important line separating the Bowies and Marc Bolans of the world from Gary Glitter and Tom Jones.
That is a minor complaint, though. For the most part, Bejar exhibits a vocal restraint that was too often missing on Rubies. Because of the strength of his personality, it is ultimately Bejar’s performance that both makes and breaks Trouble in Dreams. But when he allows his words to do their own talking and shunts unnecessary theatrical affectation, when the music stops pretending to be filled with more than is actually there, Destroyer find no trouble.
3 and 1/2 out of 5
Review by Marty Garner.
This review first appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.5 Issue 6 (April ‘08)
