I Listened to the Lana Del Rey Album
I am taking the side that says this is a fatally flawed album, fascinating though it can be. Here are some more thoughts:
- While I hold to my previous impression of it, “Video Games” is indeed the best song on the album. It’s focused and evocative where much of Born to Die is a slapdash grab-bag of signifiers—one of the few that can be said to be about more than just, well, being Lana Del Rey. It’s also one of her most straightforward vocal turns, which is telling.
- On several tracks, she seems to be confusing jumbled wordiness for the kind of half-rap sass Beyoncé and Rihanna do so well. Is this supposed to be the ‘gangster’ part of her persona? Her vocal style is too slurred and manic to handle such rapid rhythms.
- ‘Trip-hop’ or ‘future cosmetics commercial?’
- She has a flair for stringing together some truly awkward lines. “Off to the Races” and “Lolita” are nearly unlistenable in this respect. Also, rhyming is more important than she thinks it is.
- Even more grating than her words are the way she modulates the timbre of her voice from verse to verse, line to line, and sometimes word to word. Everything from nasal-Stevie-Nicks drone to hiccuping-smurf giggle. She pouts behind the beat until she’s audibly out of breath half way through a phrase, which is not pleasant to hear.
- Not that it matters much, but these songs don’t hang together as an album very well. The sequencing is senseless and haphazard. It’s also about 20 minutes too long.
- The dubious ‘authenticity’ of her persona doesn’t bother me, and in fact I suspect it’s not what’s actually bothering a lot of people who grouse about it. Born to Die’s few clear-headed moments hint at a grand-scale tragedy of American dreaming, of messy, ignoble people wanting more than anything to be magically lifted out and given the kind of sparkly, beautiful new lives they’ve seen on TV, but knowing deep down they’ll never get it. On paper it could be the foundation for a Great American Novel. Here, though, I see it as a problem of execution. The bullet point images of smalltown bad girls, James Dean-ish hearthrob dudes, mid-century Americana, aspirational Hollywood glamor, etc. come so fast and smooshed together that it scans as subterfuge. Maybe we as consumers of music are just so used to incredibly well-executed pop personae that an alarm goes off the minute we encounter a not-so-well-done one. In other words: it’s not that she’s fake, it’s that she’s just not very good.
M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Anthony Gonzalez and his cohorts don’t seem interested in anything that doesn’t immediately paint the word “EPIC” in neon purple Helvetica across the night sky, do they? They have one setting, and that setting is called “soar.” They soar and soar and soar. And soar. And soar. For 74 minutes. If they’re not soaring, they’re meandering carefully, purposefully toward the next soar moment. I mean, soaring is fun, right? The purpose of this music is to body and simultaneously eviscerate the world-crushing emotions of teenagers. That’s what Gonzalez’s last album, Saturdays = Youth, was all about and it was pretty dang great. It worked in the same basic breed of stadium synth-gaze that we find on the sprawling Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but it was also anchored in a very clear set of images that served as its spiritual guidebook: John Hughes’ romantic teen flicks from the 80s. Cheesy or obvious as it may have been, that pretense also imparted an essential up-front-ness to the album, as if Gonzalez were admitting sheepishly, right off the bat, “Yeah, I know, it sounds like Cocteau Twins. Let’s just go with it. Hey, remember Sixteen Candles?”
So no, pretentious doesn’t always equal stupid / pompous. Sometimes it can be nice to forget yourself and just be washed over by echoing tom-toms and borrowed nostalgia. But sometimes the wires can get crossed, the signifiers and signifieds switch places, and you end up with a double album of big, bright, velvety gestures that just sorta sit there and, well, gesture. My imagined conversation with Gonzalez about Hurry Up (as opposed to Saturdays = Youth’s self-aware quip) would go something like this. He: “Wow! Look at all the stars! Everything’s so beautiful!” Me: “Yup, it sure is.” He: “But I mean WOW! Just look at them! WOOOOOW!” Me: “No yeah, I get it, it’s nice.” He, whispering: “Yeah, wow…wow…” Me: “Okay I’m gonna call a cab and go home now.” I have little patience for this kind of crescendo-obsessed pounding that a lot of people call ‘post-rock’ (a genre whose ranks I think it’s safe to say M83 have joined now), music that swells simply for the sake of swelling. These songs sit heavy with effort—making sure you know that every wash, every chord change, and every downbeat is a monumental labor—and they work themselves into a grand, echoey frenzy, but I never really get the sense that an emotional climax has been earned to match the musical one. Hurry Up signifies a feeling without ever daring to provoke it.
We didn’t need a story, we didn’t need a real world
We just had to keep walking
And we became the stories, we became the places
We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds
We were you before you even existed
These are the rather telling first lines of the album, whispered in a Gollum-y voice by Zola Jesus’ Nika Danilova—who slams the nail in the coffin by busting out her best Bono impression a minute or so later—over buzzy, urgent synthesizers. Considering the purposeful connection to filmic stories on Saturdays, the statement sits like a declaration of intent. And really, as soon as she says “We didn’t need a real world,” the real world gets summarily dumped for the skyward thrust of meaningless abstractions. There’s some business about lights and deserts and existence and whatnot, but who cares when there’s soaring to be done, right? Follow-up single “Midnight City” also squanders its chance at evoking a three-dimensional experience. “Waiting for a car, waiting for a ride in the dark,” sounds angst-y and teenage, doesn’t it? It hints at the essential aimlessness, the sheer and necessary boredom of adolescent life. But being the predictable crescendo junkie that he’s become, Gonzalez can’t help pawning his last scraps of relatability for something that sounds Important: “This city is my church.” Whoops, lost it! During the hour that follows you’ve got children narrating what is supposed to be an endearingly naive and idealistic story about becoming frogs and playing together, but which ends up literally describing a biblical plague covering the earth, some additional mumble-whispering about encountering big purple lights in the desert (See? Told you.), and lots more songs where—get this—M83 start out kinda quiet but then they gradually get louder (!) to look forward to.
But wait, isn’t it unfair to castigate Gonzalez, a non-native English speaker for one thing and someone who’s clearly more interested in musical effect than verbal clout anyway, for having crappy lyrics? And don’t you love your fair share of ‘meaningless abstractions’ disguised as songs? Why yes it is and yes I do! See, it’s the point at which things like crappy lyrics, predictable song arcs, and facsimilized emotions come together under one banner, the banner of Bigness, that Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming fails for me. Tom Ewing talked about the pitfalls of big-sounding music in his recent Poptimist column, about the ways that epic rock can function as a kind of secular gospel music, putting on the trappings of transcendence or transformation but only for the sake of aesthetics. Regardless of your personal fondness for or revulsion to it, you recognize on some level that you are being manipulated by the grandiosity of the music, by the salvation promised—but not delivered—in the epic sweep of it. Other kinds of aesthetic manipulation don’t bother me so much because they don’t purport to mean as much as something like M83. If a band fakes being quaintly twee or ruggedly folky or spacey and futuristic, I’m willing to meet them at least halfway because those sounds don’t usually puff themselves up with hollow grandness. The bigger the sound, the more obvious the dupe, and I don’t like the feeling of being duped.
Like I said earlier, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, is about the outsized emotions of teenagers, about how everything feels weighty and eternal when you’re that age. Gonzalez’s synthy squall nails the bigness of it all, but follows in the footsteps of the most eye-rolling epic rock by ignoring the need for real, human substance underneath it. After a few spins you may find yourself in thrall to such wide-eyed sounds, but to stop and question—even for a second—what it actually means is to be confronted with the unintentional flatness of this record. Big sounds have their place, as does teen melodrama, but here M83 do a disservice to both by reaching exclusively for the purple, echoey, low-hanging emotional fruit.
Widowspeak - Widowspeak
Let’s confront the obvious part first: Molly Hamilton, of the new Brooklyn trio Widowspeak, has a voice with a lot of the same qualities as Hope Sandoval’s. She sings in the lower part of her register with a hint of huskiness and can, at times, drag certain notes slightly out of tune for effect. When Sandoval does it, there’s a distinctly narcotic vibe and her band generally plays loose and slow to accentuate it. The best Mazzy Star songs sound like they’re fading (ahem) in and out of consciousness. That’s not what Widowspeak do.
Widowspeak make tight, deliberate, carefully-considered songs. You won’t find tambourines and guitars languishing behind the beat here. In fact, you won’t find any detail that seems off-the-cuff or dedicated to atmosphere above development. This band has a gift for crafting lean, focused, and engaging arrangements. The guitar leads aren’t anything flashy, but they give equal attention to hook (“Nightcrawlers,” “Half Awake”) and texture (“Limbs,” “Harsh Light”), using only dashes of reverb or sonic grime. The drums have an earthy weight to them, a strength of purpose that neither pummels nor grandstands. Notice how, on the chorus of “Nightcrawlers,” the little bits of double-time gallop nudge the song ever forward, making it one of the most fun laments (a useful new oxymoron?) on an album already brimming with them.
“You think you’re low, but you can get lower,” coos Hamilton on “Hard Times,” another standout track. It’s a rudimentary break-up song set in the gray months of late autumn, and even as she bemoans not only the pain but the utter banality of it all—“We met at the end of October / it’s the same thing over and over”—the simple sweetness of her “oooOOoo” and the liveliness of the band around her make it sound fresh. That’s another gift of Widowspeak’s: they can redeem their own shortness of poetic lyricism with the careful rise and fall of a hook. Take for example the way Hamilton blithely slurs together the syllabic repetitions of “Fir Coat” (“it would still feel fi-ai-ai-ai-ne”) or the coyness of the aforementioned “Nightcrawler”s ode to evenings out on the town, “We won’t remember what we do.”
I would argue that Widowspeak is less a work of nostalgia than simply a work with clear reference points that manage not to wholly define it. Like I said, for all the Hope Sandoval comparisons, listening to Widowspeak doesn’t really feel like listening to Mazzy Star, and the other touchstones one might pick out—50s and 60s pop/rock, mostly—don’t tend to hold up as legitimate points of nostalgia in an era of such rampant pop revivalism. There’s certainly a sense of longing in much of Hamilton’s delivery, a downtroddenness or sense of loss (“Harsh Realm” especially), but it doesn’t bear a clear connection to time and place. Some of that stems from the fact that this is a band that’s figured out the “how” before the “what,” but a lot of it is just because not all songs about sadness and loss have to contain homages to the specific past. Invoke the 90s if it helps you enjoy it, but I don’t hear this record painting the listener into some kind of corner where that’s the only way out. It’s an easy distinction to overlook, but it’s why I’m doubly glad Widowspeak are around to remind us.
Wye Oak - Civilian
I like to think of Wye Oak as comfortable middle children of indie rock (if ‘comfortable middle children’ can exist), surrounded on both sides by bands with far more to prove than they ever will. Despite being three full-lengths into their career, Jenn Wassner and Andy Stack have never found themselves thrust out into a bigger spotlight by a critical / commercial success, so they don’t face exterior pressure to one-up themselves. They’ve also never ridden the blog machine on the back of a hotly circulated mp3, etc., so there’s no ‘hype’ that they’re then obliged to live up to. Plenty of late-decade bands exist in this perennial no-man’s-land, but Wye Oak is one of the few that sound at home there, like the idea of twisting themselves into something more ‘relevant’ and attention-grabbing has never even occurred to them. I mean, they do know it’s 2011, right?
The funny thing is if you toned down the guitars they could be just a few glockenspiel plinks short of Etsy-pop (my new favorite condescending descriptor) car commercial soundtrack ubiquity. Wassner’s voice hits this admirable point between deep, grown-up expressiveness and velvety melodic prowess, while the duo’s most accessible moments, like those on 2007 debut If Children or last year’s My Neighbor / My Creator EP—a favorite here at PN—show a highly developed ear for songwriting and a knack for subtle arrangements. They also just finished a tour opening for, uh, The Decemberists (speaking of ‘Etsy-pop’…), so there’s that. Listening to Wye Oak, one often gets the sense that they’re a band always on the cusp of something bigger, but also willfully evasive of any opportunity they might have to ‘break through.’ If you’re wired a certain way, this makes them very likable.
Fortunately, Civilian finds Wye Oak not caring at all that I think they could have a nice career “putting a bird on it,” so to speak. The new album is of a piece with their lunging sophomore effort The Knot (2009) in that it likes to offset their folkier, friendlier aspects with the dark clouds of Wassner’s distortion pedal heroics and Stack’s detailed backing. Riffage is an important part of what makes this band work, though (so forgive me if I seemed to downplay it), and this record does indeed one-up its predecessor by proving that Wye Oak can unite all their impulses under one banner. Opener “Two Small Deaths” fades from crowd chatter to dreamy harmonics, but it’s propelled the whole way by Stack’s tireless rim clicks and Wassner’s arpeggiating, an introduction that refuses to announce the album’s arrival with any loud, crashing fare. “Holy Holy” is perpetually unstable, punctuating its unresolving verses with scratchy bent-string vamps until two thirds of the way through, when they stop everything and bust out this satisfyingly grungy chorus that gets ridden out to the end.
Throughout most of Civilian, Wye Oak sound intent on surprising the listener with noisy left turns, a gambit that doesn’t always pay off the way they want. “Plains” spends so much time dragging its feet through long verses that its loud, intermittent trills—shocking as they are—seem to exist simply for the sake of shock. “Dog Eyes” fares better, hopscotching between a peppy Modest Mouse shimmy and thunderous slo-mo downstrokes. Though its dusty desert atmosphere is appealing, “We Were Wealth” is functionally one big 5-minute crescendo and there are already too many of those in this world. Plus, it’s a prime example of Civilian’s main weakness: the fact that Wassner purposefully holds her (very capable!) voice back, singing through her cheeks and letting her guitars do the talking. It’s a shame because, when her words are legible, she comes off as an earnest skeptic trying to get a grip on identity and faith. “If you should doubt, my heart, remember this / that I would lie to you if I believed it was right to do,” she sings to herself on the album’s spare closer, her fingerpicked guitar filling the room around her. It’s heavy subject matter that fits with Wye Oak’s slowcore roots, however out of fashion they may be. That’s one of the saving graces of Civilian, though: like I said, this band never set out to be fashionable.
Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine
And so, perhaps as quickly as it began, the nascent chillwave scene in American indie rock summarily ends. OK maybe that’s over-selling it just a tad, but it does seem that, with his second album, Chaz Bundick has learned what godfather Ariel Pink found out on his last record (we need not be buried in inverted lo-fi VHS haze to explore these old sounds), as well as what Dan Bejar proved with his latest Destroyer outing (the spectrum of ‘smooth’ music is much wider and richer than you think). Back when first single “Still Sound” appeared in December, I wrote about how it seemed like Bundick was an artist in search of his sound, already too big for the britches with which he’d first been fitted. Underneath the Pine, then, is our glimpse into the next step of his artistic development, though certainly not the final destination.
In a lot of ways, Bundick is still working within the same loose concepts of sonic nostalgia, laid-back vibes, and a sense of puppyish vulnerability that evades any bloody specificity, but the forms his work takes have shifted somewhat. There is the aforementioned “Still Sound,” which puts a blocky funk bass line against a slick disco strut for one of Toro Y Moi’s grooviest moments to date, as well as the sunshine soul of “New Beat,” which follows the trail of Daft Punk’s vintage synth squiggles back to Stevie Wonder, making a very strong bid for the most immediately likable song in his short catalog. But where these two songs are undoubtedly some of Pine’s brightest standouts (and likely fan favorites), they don’t actually speak all that well to where much of the album goes. Bundick builds a lot of these songs out of thick, iterating piano chords (Innervisions style) while also situating them in a kind of dated, almost nautical setting that can be too murky and harrowing to be rightly called ‘life-affirming’ (or some other such Wonder-ish term). Remember those short Sven Libaek pieces from the Life Aquatic soundtrack? Or “Bennie and the Jets?” I hear a similar 70s vibe and windy sense of adventure at work here, minus much of the whimsy.
That’s not to say that Pine is a dark album, but it is a conflicted one that inadvertently pines (!!!) for ‘simpler’ times the way the heavily filtered sounds on Causers of This did. “This is where I want you to take me when I die…underneath the pine on a bed of leaves,” goes a titular line from “How I Know,” as Bundick drapes his thin voice in ride cymbals and propulsive chords, but the ache extends beyond his words in places like the careening wails of “Got Blinded” or the spooky dissonance of “Good Hold.” There’s no doubt his songwriting is improving, but one only needs to get through the album’s first track—the slow-built groove “Intro Chi Chi”—to be reminded of his exceptional knack for production and arrangement. Where on Causers he used synth-y bedroom aesthetics to his advantage, here he transcends them by crafting a record that feels wholly analog, a one-man band that sounds like five veteran players.
This is how Pine earns both its greatest and most back-handed complement. It’s probably one of the best sounding records you’ll hear all year, what with its sophisticated soul-pop constructions playing so wonderfully against its ear-hugging production. But if that sounds like a tacit criticism of Bundick’s presence as a writer and performer, well, I think the shoe fits. The widening divide between his often wounded, mewling, far-off singing and the effusive energy and detail of his music throws into relief the variance in levels of confidence across disciplines. Like I said at the beginning of this review, though: all this means is that he hasn’t quite arrived at his wheelhouse, an idea that makes that much more sense when you remember he’s still only 24 years old and on his second album. In the mean time, Underneath the Pine is a highly enjoyable listen that provides more than enough reason to stick around for whatever Bundick’s going to do next.
James Blake - James Blake
James Blake’s hotly anticipated debut album is riddled with silence. He makes songs around gaping holes—the dead air space between glitch beats and his cracked, processed falsetto—and we all know that silence can be downright painful in a certain state of mind. Just this week I was sitting in my room streaming this album and I could not for the life of me calm my own head down enough to get on Blake’s minimalist wavelength. I was inexplicably swimming with random thoughts about stuff I’d read, other music, my plans for the weekend, mundane stuff that starts to itch at the back of your skull when it’s given room to move. A good antidote, I found, was to play Tetris (well, the Mac facsimile of it), noticing how the process of stacking all these blocks together mirrors the way Blake builds his tunes. Tom Ewing pointed out in his last Poptimist column (and I think he’s right) that the album’s nakedness draws a lot of attention to the musical choices Blake makes seemingly in real time. He’ll put a few pieces together—some drum blips, a piano chord, a two-line vocal phrase—and then clear them away like a completed row of Tetris blocks, using the leftover scraps to build the next line. Hearing the isolation of each sound is where the perception of empty space comes from.
This is all well and good in a somewhat dry, mechanical sense, but most of us aren’t looking to listen to music for its unique construction. We’re primarily interested in the emotional experience, the human outcome of all the space and repetition and designed sounds. Because of the quavering character of his voice and his clear devotion to soul and R&B stylings, Blake gets favorable Antony and Bon Iver comparisons (“Why Don’t You Call Me” would be a perfect fit for Hegarty), but I’d like to suggest another name that might help illuminate what I think he’s up to here: America’s sweetheart Kanye West. I’m thinking specifically of West’s 9-minute album show-stopper “Runaway,” which opens with the rapper alone at a piano, hitting rock bottom as he mashes a single key over and over again, letting the sound of the hammer and string decay into nothingness. It’s a sound that suggests not only miserable solitude—one note, one beat, one sound, all alone—but also the same kind of real-time musical processing that Blake does. It’s impossible to hear the opening of “Runaway” without picturing West at the piano, considering first the sound itself and then moving his fingers over the keys to outline the chord progression for song he’s about to start. Though the equipment is different, Blake hanging bass thumps and vocal melodies in mid air demonstrates the same process and, ultimately, a very similar set of feelings.
Blake’s songs (if you’re still keen to call them songs) maintain a single-minded focus on dejection. The one-two punch of “Wilhelms Scream” and “I Never Learnt to Share” near the beginning of the album contain some of his most memorable phrases: “I don’t know about my dreams / I don’t know about my dreaming anymore / all that I know is I’m falling, falling, falling,” and “My brother and my sister don’t speak to me / but I don’t blame them.” They don’t look like much on paper, but that’s part of how this in-process music works; spaced repetition lends them their gravity. Notice how, just as West spends a good part of “Runaway” calling himself a scumbag and an asshole, Blake spends several songs tactily copping to his own flaws. “Share” constructs a story of sibling estrangement with a title and those two short lines, while the aforementioned “Why Don’t You Call Me”—“Why don’t you call me / what we both know I am?”—is such a stark statement that all of Blake’s sample fiddling can’t keep it from cutting. Even when the words aren’t clear, like on opener “Unluck,” the plaintive thinness and constant cracking of his voice can be quite poignant.
Blake’s pervasive use of vocoders and various levels of auto-tune across the album is key: it’s another way of illustrating compositional action while highlighting the spare, pitiable depression of the songs. Looking at the twin “Lindesfarne”s, the traditional notion of digital vocal smoothing—that it serves to dehumanize voices by bleaching out nuance—doesn’t hold up against the more contemporary sense that it’s about turning a voice into an instrument. If we can hear the implied keyboards dictating the pitch and timbre of Blake’s voice, then we can more easily hear him ‘playing’ it—looping and re-pitching it to create digital choirs—like he does everything else. The emotive effect comes through, though, largely as a play on the thin line between the rusty imperfection of Blake’s natural voice (the frailty and cracking I’ve already mentioned) and the melismatic lines dictated by the vocoders that suggest their own kind of instability. You know Kanye’s long, distorted vocoder solo at the end of “Runaway” (or West collaborator Bon Iver’s “Woods,” for that matter)? The effect is almost identical.
I should emphasize that I’m not drawing this big comparison to “Runaway” to try to suggest that fans of one will like the other or that there’s some kind of similar ‘greatness’ to each (for people have done a lot of talking about West and greatness lately), but simply to show how some of the more seemingly esoteric things Blake does are still connected to the language of pop music and have manifested themselves in more familiar ways than you might think. I’m not as fond of his centerpiece cover of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love” as some (I always preferred cool/coy Feist to wailing/dramatic Feist), but it’s also by far the most accessible inroad to Blake’s style and sonic character, so if everything I’ve been saying just sounds like circular nonsense to you, maybe that’d be a good place to start.
Destroyer - Kaputt
“A life in art and a life of mimicry is the same thing!” Dan Bejar once yelped, and although, as we’ve already said, he’s not doing a whole lot of yelping or yowling these days, he has clearly not forgotten this biting thesis of a koan. If anyone is going to have a hard time getting into Kaputt (though general internet chatter indicates a lot of people really like this record, so maybe I’m just projecting here), it’s going to be on account of Bejar’s mimicry. The album finds him dressing his songs up in the white blazers and penny loafers of yacht rock, smooth jazz, and the most vanilla of R&B pop. Electronic drums ride spartan grooves as airy keys lay out the chords and fretless bass glides along up front. Trumpet and saxophone hover in the wings, providing accent colors pulled from a time when (it seemed) people still felt there could be something sexy and alluring about them. This thing is Smooth with a capital S.
‘Mimicry,’ though? Why can’t we just say that this is part of the larger renewed interest in soft rock sounds among indie bands? Why does Destroyer doing this sort of thing look more like deliberate ideological costuming than someone like, say, Ariel Pink? Because this is part of the way Bejar makes music. His songs are recognizable more by their non-sonic construction than by the instruments executing them (something I think he even acknowledges on “Savage Night at the Opera”). Four chords are nice, but he really only needs two, and his four-line phrases love to let their own verbosity force them to tumble around within the mid-tempo rhythms. Often it works for no other reason than the fact that Bejar knows how to stick the landing on such twists and turns, changing the music for the last bar or isolating his voice so the last eloquently-written line of each quatrain really hits home. There’s also a lot of ba-da-da and la-la-la-ing. My point is you know a Destroyer song when you hear one and it has very little to do with whether he’s using acoustic guitars or keyboards or disco drums. It bothered me at first that I couldn’t listen to Kaputt without instantly recalling songs from Rubies in a way that overshadowed it, but then I realized that I was simply recognizing and drawing a path through the DNA of all of Bejar’s music, the music that only he can make.
In this light I’ve started to read Kaputt’s new sound as an atmospheric signpost, an indication of the moody meaning of these songs that creates a far more vivid experience than just reading the lyrics off a page (which I hear Destroyer fans are apt to do). Glassy guitar, soused piano, and reverb-laden flute trade off eerie solos for the first few minutes of “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” each one reflecting in its own way the mix of austere luxury and inescapable melancholy that permeates the record. A lot of it seems to be centered around disillusionment with artsy fame and opulent night life. “Poor child, you’re never gonna make it / New York City just wants to see you naked and they will,” he croons on “Demo,” warning against any hope in that life of artistic mimicry. The title track begins with a similarly weary sentiment—“Wasting your days chasing some girls, alright / chasing cocaine through the back rooms of the world all night”—but its the backing vocals from Sibel Thrasher (who always seems to pop up just before Bejar’s glazed delivery gets old) and the way the trumpet flourish and feathery guitar strum fade off into the blank ether that imbue the lines with feeling. It just wouldn’t have the same impact with an acoustic guitar.
One of my favorite tracks, “Poor in Love,” has a kind of Peter Gabriel cadence and spareness to it, a refreshingly clear addition to the often smoky mood lighting of Kaputt. Bejar’s more careful not to let his words crowd the song, too, as he meditates on a quintessential summary of the tortured artist (no love and no money) and finds little consolation in a backhanded complement: “She took me aside and said ‘Look I don’t do this everyday, but you’ve got style / all you’ve got is style.” I don’t know that I’d relish a lot more of this kind of work from him, but it has a certain upbeatness to it and as an exception to Bejar’s sometimes narrow rules, it works. And of course, no good Destroyer album would be complete without a 10-minute plus bookend, and here the previously-released “Bay of Pigs” makes a return in a newly-edited form (it’s less ambient, really). Though it doesn’t stem from quite the same aesthetic blueprint—more disco and house than soft rock and jazz—it feels of a piece with the rest of the album because that intrinsic Destroyer-ness remains palpable against the strain of hollow melancholy. “I’m sick of fighting / beneath the diseased lighting / of the discotheque at night,” he sighs, just in case you haven’t been paying attention for the last 45 minutes. Given all this pallid music and unavoidable hopelessness, the jaunty beat-driven ending “Bay” eventually works itself up to is maybe the closest thing to closure Kaputt can offer. Perhaps as one final nod to the perceived suaveness of his new garb, Bejar offers this debonair seduction: “Free and easy, gentle, gentle / the wind through the trees makes you mental for me.” Damn that’s smooth.
