_____________________________________________________________________________
::k4:
a r t i s t :: Destroyer
t i t l e :: Poison Season
d a t e :: 2015-00-00
l a b e l :: Merge
g e n r e :: Indie
s o u r c e :: CD
b i t r a t e :: 859 kbps avg
e n c o d e r :: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V
t r a c k s :: 13
p l a y t i m e :: 52:14
s i z e :: 324.2MB
tracklist
1 Times Square, Poison Season I 2:34
2 Dream Lover 3:48
3 Forces From Above 5:51
4 Hell 3:17
5 The River 3:35
6 Girl In A Sling 3:04
7 Times Square 4:11
8 Archer On The Beach 4:56
9 Midnight Meet The Rain 3:24
10 Solace's Bride 3:43
11 Bangkok 5:14
12 Sun In The Sky 5:33
13 Times Square, Poison Season II 3:04
releasenotes
Dan Bejar's intellect is so formidable it feels like an event, and Destroyer
has, for 12 years or so, been indie rock's most rewarding intellectual
project. You listen to Destroyer to hear the smartest person at a party mutter
funny and erudite things in your ear. Even by 2006, Bejar had generated a
world deep and manifold enough that fans of his made, and passed around, a Dan
Bejar lyric generator. His mind, and the music he's made exploring its
contours, is a minor zip code in independent rock music.
Kaputt from 2011 exposed that zip code a little bit, briefly subjecting Bejar
to the indignities of mid-level festival-touring success. It was the most
immediately beautiful record he'd ever made, but it also accidentally
coincided with a rising interest in the soft rock of the 1970s and '80s, which
meant that Bejar, long the wry bridge troll beneath the zeitgeist, momentarily
represented it. The story is important to Bejar's career, but it feels like an
ancillary concern to Poison Season, his new album. The point and pleasure of
Destroyer's world, after all, is that it motors away on its own juice,
irrespective of others. The world is a big place, his records seem to say,
and it can be wearying and demanding, but your thoughts are a republic
entirely within your control. As he memorably put it on Destroyer's Rubies'
"Painter in Your Pocket": "You looked OK with the others, you looked great on
your own."
Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of Kaputt, leavening it with
the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. There are string
arrangements all over Poison Season, and they are gorgeously recorded: the
orchestra on "Girl in a Sling" sounds like 180-gram vinyl even while in
earbuds. Destroyer has always partly been a nostalgia project, even when
Bejar's nostalgia was decidedly ersatzùhis records aim to stir the feelings
that classic recordings arouse in us. Streethawk hearkened back to glam-rock
Bowie even if the resemblance was off, and the magic of Kaputt was partly that
of a peculiar and gnomic figure like Bejar conjuring the jaded romanticism of
Bryan Ferry. On Poison Season, he visits a different section of his record
collection, one that predates rock'n'roll, and he applies all the studied love
and imagination to the endeavor we've come to expect from him.
Bejar uses his voice in new ways here, stretching words out generously on the
two-part story-song "Bangkok" so that we feel the beauty of the melody but
also don't miss the bumps and crags in his throat. There's a basic tenderness
that communicates itself beneath the vermouth of his words, and they remain a
joy to soak in, a purposeful blurring of sense and sound. Lines like "The
writing on the wall/ Wasn't writing at all" or "It sucks when there's nothing
but gold in those hills" resist interpretation and invite savoringùthe
Destroyer-lyric-generator couplet here would probably be "The ass king's made
of asses, the ice queen's made of snow," from "Archer on the Beach". But my
favorite moment might be Bejar muttering "aw shit, here comes the sun" on
"Dream Lover", the Bruce Springsteen-style rocker that, as he told Pitchfork,
he didn't even want to make. The juxtapositionùa curmudgeon swearing under his
breath as the horns and drums he's arranged around him power the record up to
transcendenceùis, as he Bejar noted with some self-deprecation in that same
interview, "Destroyer 101."
In fact, there are moments on Poison Season where Bejar's formidable mind
threatens to drag the proceedings down a bit. The swooning '50s strings
sometimes collides awkwardly with the '70s pop gesturesùthe funk bass line
that peppers "Midnight Meet the Rain" mostly serves to underline the
sleepiness of the album's last third. "Hell" lurches between ponderous chamber
pop and a swinging beat, capturing the album's uncertainty about exactly what
kind of dance it's doing. For an album that took an unusual amount of time for
Bejar to makeùthe four years separating Poison Season from Kaputt represents
his longest stretch everùit feels tonally hesitant, jets of cold water and
warmth doled out in furtive and uncontrolled doses. He has never made, and
will probably never make, a bad albumùhe's far too accomplished, intuitive,
and literate for that. But on Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the
dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.
https://www.mergerecords.com/destroyer
_____________________________________________________________________________
Destroyer-Poison_Season-(MRG569)-CD-FLAC-2015-k4