Aural Fixations

DESTROYER
Your Blues
(Merge)
For his fifth album under the Destroyer sobriquet, Canadian songwriter Dan Bejar takes a different path than the opulent roadways he's traversed in the past. While before he's used a full band to fill in the details of his intricate, often extravagant glam/psych compositions, for Your Blues he's stripped his sound down to a more intimate level of presentation. His melodies are sweeter and his vocals more conversational, the flourishes and crescendos more organic. Accompanied only by synth duo JC/DC (AKA John Collins and Daniel Carswell), Bejar sounds more relaxed and self-confident than ever before, and he demystifies his songwriting accordingly. The opener "Notorious Lightning" may baffle with the lyrics "Oh, Notorious Lightning! Yes, I had to ride you and trash the crystal jets they kept in storage inside you!" but when he brings it home with an anxious cry of "And someone's got to fall/Before someone goes free!" the emotional attack becomes clear (if not exactly plain). Bejar may deliberately obfuscate his intentions most of the time, but when he sings "Feeling fine/But it must be the wine/Cause it's April 27th and my baby's still dying on me" (from "The Music Lovers") or "It's gonna take an airplane to get me off the ground/I don't blame anyone who isn't sticking around" (from "It's Gonna Take an Airplane"), he tips his hand, and it's a full house of pain. The quietly desperate "Don't Become the Thing You Hated" is practically a haiku of anxiety in its simplicity. That Bejar and JC/DC cloak these sentiments in the most lush and enticing music he's yet produced makes the trap all the more tender. Michael Toland [buy it]