Destroyer - Your Blues
Dan Bejar is amazing! He's the front man for Destroyer and is also a member of the New Pornographers. His songwriting is superb and his talk/sing vocal style is as captivating and powerfully emotional. Both create an unmistakable sound and style that is uniquely Bejar, his tracks on New Pornographers albums always stand out, and they are typically my enduring favorites as his songs offer plenty of depth to keep you coming back for more. I just bought an earlier album of his called 'Your Blues' and thought I would share some of the highlights from that album. Rubies is a more recent effort and is also fantastic. His music is not always so accessible so keep an open mind, this is not pop music, there are seldom obvious hooks... if you don't like it at first come back to it in a few days, it will probably grow on you it has certainly grown on me.
Reviews:
Pitchforkmedia's Matt LeMay - 8.6/10.0 Ultimately, though, it's the most initially vexing aspects of Your Blues that prove the most endearing, memorable, and surprisingly touching. Like Bejar's 2002 release This Night, Your Blues constitutes a fundamental challenge to deeply ingrained conventions of sincerity and emotional honesty. The record's conceptual brilliance lies largely in Bejar's ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements, subtly suggesting that all music, if not all human expression, is in effect some sort of artifice. Bejar's critical engagement with codified aesthetic techniques certainly renders Your Blues a less immediately "accessible" record, and can at first come off as kitschy or detached. But the album's unique and defiant expression makes this the most holistically accomplished album Bejar has released to date.
Indieworkshop's Grant Capes What this album has going for it are factors so numerous, it will be difficult to enumerate and illuminate, but I shall press on nonetheless. The first and most important strength is Bejar's innate gift for songwriting, in whatever mode or medium he chooses. Eschewing the rock-n-roll tint of his earlier works, "Your Blues" embraces the already expected lyrics of this poetic genius and combines it with an almost childlike love of 80's pop mechanics and synthwork. No matter what instrumentation he chooses, the magic of his lyrics and the strength of his delivery shine through.
Exercises for the reader:
Notorious Lightning
It's Gonna Take An Airplane
New Ways of Living
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Reviews:
Pitchforkmedia's Matt LeMay - 8.6/10.0 Ultimately, though, it's the most initially vexing aspects of Your Blues that prove the most endearing, memorable, and surprisingly touching. Like Bejar's 2002 release This Night, Your Blues constitutes a fundamental challenge to deeply ingrained conventions of sincerity and emotional honesty. The record's conceptual brilliance lies largely in Bejar's ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements, subtly suggesting that all music, if not all human expression, is in effect some sort of artifice. Bejar's critical engagement with codified aesthetic techniques certainly renders Your Blues a less immediately "accessible" record, and can at first come off as kitschy or detached. But the album's unique and defiant expression makes this the most holistically accomplished album Bejar has released to date.
Indieworkshop's Grant Capes What this album has going for it are factors so numerous, it will be difficult to enumerate and illuminate, but I shall press on nonetheless. The first and most important strength is Bejar's innate gift for songwriting, in whatever mode or medium he chooses. Eschewing the rock-n-roll tint of his earlier works, "Your Blues" embraces the already expected lyrics of this poetic genius and combines it with an almost childlike love of 80's pop mechanics and synthwork. No matter what instrumentation he chooses, the magic of his lyrics and the strength of his delivery shine through.
Exercises for the reader:
Notorious Lightning
It's Gonna Take An Airplane
New Ways of Living
posted by JonBen at 11:52 AM
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