Canada's Dan Bejar, who is better known under his rock moniker Destroyer, has become a bit of an overnight success as of late. Like most other overnight success stories, Bejar's was a long time in the making - twelve years to be exact.
That's either how long it took the fair-weather fans of the indie-pop world to finally move on from Death Cab For Cutie or how long it took Bejar to agree to letting others sand off some of the rougher edges that kept his music from being as approachable as it could have been.
This is, after all, the same man who released the brazen ear-stabber We'll Build Them A Golden Bridge in 1996 with the seeming intent on killing any chance of a career before it even began. Of course, by 1998's City Of Daughters, he'd not only learned to tune his guitar, but to also rely upon others to do the heavy lifting, leaving him room to craft some of the most achingly heartfelt songs to come out of the otherwise dreadful decade known as "The 90's".
Much like Death Cab, whose 2004 major-label effort Plans led an entire generation of mainstream "indie kids" to seek out that band's previous works, Destroyer's ken will no doubt result in a similar sales boon for Merge Records, who've been quietly keeping the dream alive by releasing every Destroyer record since 2002's This Night.
With the music industry having reduced itself to a sad joke, by and large, Merge is as much a major label as any actual major label these days, capable of breaking artists like the Arcade Fire and Spoon, among others. Hence, the release of ken just may hasten that most dreaded of days when longtime fans have to learn to share Destroyer with the rest of the world.
Having said that, oh, what a strange, beautiful record ken turned out to be.
Opening with the lilting Sparks-like "Sky's Grey", longtime fans are almost lulled into a false sense of security that is obliterated by "In The Morning", which rewrites Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side" for a generation of hipsters completely unaware of its existence.
"Tinseltown Swimming In Blood" apes a Peter Hook bass line all the while driving its ear-worm chorus into your head with a tasty synth ice pick. Three songs in and we're already wondering why we haven't heard two of these songs on the Top 40 station. What kind of strange new world are we living in?
It is at this point that we realize we're tempted to continue comparing every song on the album to familiar artists you may already know and love, but doing so almost does a disservice to this record.
Yet it is a testament to Bejar's genius that he finds a way to weave such obvious influences as the Smiths ("Cover From The Sun"), Violent Femmes ("Saw You At The Hospital"), and the Divine Comedy ("Rome") into something so focused and uniquely his own.
Let's face it, as far as pop music is concerned, everything has been done, but, in the case of ken, regurgitation has never tasted so good.
Tags:
kiss destroyer hello