Live: Destroyer — Scruffy and Smashed
DestroyerBowery Ballroom, New York City
Perpetually scruffy, wordy and oblique, Destroyer leader (and sometime New Pornographer) Dan Bejar (left) is like your favorite befuddling-but-cool English Lit professor — you may not understand exactly what he's going on about most of the time, and that's the point. Obviously, bards from Shakespeare to Dylan have inspired the offbeat singer-songwriter, but we didn't realize how much certain (let's say) substances played into the Destroyer masterplan until we saw them live. If Bejar wasn't working from an altered plane at last Wednesday's NYC show, he sure fooled us. Not to say he was a useless mess slurring against the machine; Most of his syllable-filled tunes were loose but they never completely fell apart. During the encore, we're pretty sure Bejar said, "I'm going to swallow this song," before launching into another twisty quasi-jam — he was probably feeling more than a little tingly inside.
Drummer Fisher Rose, on the other hand, was a bit more together. As Bejar noodled and swayed, Rose held the Destroyer crew together with precise timing and awesome power — if he were to lose hold of a drumstick, it most certainly would've blown a hole through the back of the club. The relatively straightforward songs from Destroyer's recent album, Trouble in Dreams, including the whimsical "Dark Leaves Form a Thread" and the mini-epic "Leopard of Honor" were obvious, um, highs; the new LP finds Bejar allowing himself some New Pornographers-style power-pop hooks (instead of non-stop Bowie-meets-Gollum weirdness) and is all the better for it. At the show, Bejar embodied the inebriated showman pose: chuckling at unheard punchlines and singing his inscrutable songs as if they made total sense.
