Dan Bejar is on the warpath.
“I really despise pop music these days,” he said in a recent interview after allegedly cutting the two catchiest songs from his latest Destroyer album Poison Season. The reason for his ire is likely 2011’s deservedly acclaimed Kaputt, which shot the former cult hero to indie stardom. The jazz and disco-flavored album was easy for fans to love because it sounded great and easy for critics to love because it focused less on Bejar’s impenetrable lyrics than usual.
Poison Season counters this by being of a class of record Bejar’s been making for decades: cryptic, word-drunk, occasionally musically interesting. The arrangements are more organic than Kaputt‘s, though that record’s shimmering horns remain. Loud guitars pop up sometimes. Piano is prevalent, as are creaky strings that evoke the same stately wonder as Bach’s ubiquitous “Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1” (look it up, you’ve heard it in movies).
There’s not much for fair-weather fans to latch onto. It doesn’t sound good in the background, and there are no transportive textures to float away on. Rather, Bejar’s words are front and center at all times. He’s a slippery wordsmith. Even after including no less than three versions of “Times Square” on the album, it’s hard to glean exactly what it means. Haughty words like “solace” might lead one to think they have to understand what Bejar is on about to appreciate Poison Season.
They don’t, and this is is where Bejar’s litmus test succeeds so well. Most of the people who will love this record are those intimately familiar with Destroyer and who know what to expect when they put one of their albums on. Bejar is deluded if he expects people to understand his lyrics. It’s the distinct images that count. “Stapled to the neck of the storm.” “The ice queen’s made of snow.”(“Archer on the Beach”) “In a windowless room on the outskirts of town overlooking the river.” (“The River”) These bits of imagery are all over Poison Season, and it’s up to the listener to fill in the blanks.
Where Poison Season fails in its fan-scouring endeavors is that the pop songs are the best things here. “Dream Lover” is fantastic, a spiky wall of guitars and saxophones that crescendos on cue as Bejar curses, “aw shit, here comes the sun” – and settles with a wave of his hand. The horn-driven “Hell” sounds like a Beirut song with Zach Condon’s troubadour romanticism replaced by Bejar’s bile. “Archer On The Beach,” an older cut he first recorded five years ago with ambient guru Tim Hecker, is presented here as a haunting piano ballad.
“Times Square” is interesting: the two alternate versions might have helped Bejar feel better about writing pop, but they don’t do much for the listener except tack an extra five minutes onto the record. The same applies to some of the deeper Side Two cuts, including the meandering “Bangkok” and the spy-movie bombast “Midnight Meet The Rain.” These tracks don’t scan as anti-pop, just unfocused. But it’s admirable of Bejar to continue making music he wants to make in the face of indie renown, which can be as destructive as any other kind of fame. If you’re a Destroyer fan, you’ll like Poison Season a lot. If not, know what to expect.