Destroyer - In Search of Omnia-Pop

Destroyer were formed in 1995 in Vancouver by songwriter Daniel Bejar. Their musical output is a form of singer-songwriter pop, colorful and creative; an eclectic, unusual ceremony, both musically and lyrically.

A splendor that gradually blossomed and revealed itself in full force over more than a decade, during which Bejar emerged as one of the greatest pop talents around.

Endowed with a supple, vulnerable and unusual vocal style, he's also an intriguing, ineffable lyricist, and above all he pairs a rare melodic gift with an imaginative, fabulist sensibility that keeps the songwriting forever young - the true "Destroyer" trademark.

Destroyer's debut album was made by Bejar in his own home, rigged up as a recording studio, the fruit of years of amateur songwriting. We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge (1996, Tinker) is pure informal art, laid down with no frills on a four-track, akin to the most crooked and easygoing lo-fi indie-rock bands of the era (think the most fragmented Pavement, Wingtip Sloat, Further…).

Perhaps out of necessity rather than artistic choice: the 1996 incarnation of Destroyer is, in short, musically disguised and elusive, in order to truly stand out and rise above the rest. The remarkable musical traits to come are still silent, and few would have bet on them.

At times ballads surface with the barest touch of strings, like “Streets Of Fire” and “Breakin’ The Law”; amused atmospheres, after-party drowsiness on “Rose Fleched This”. The sense of torpor in the accordion of “Saddestroyer” is a real delight.

It's all a succession of impressionistic little rural-band marches, whose straightforwardness occasionally ripples with experimental quirks and flourishes to liven things up (Casio keyboards, folk instruments, handclapping…).

The voice is always a murmur or else distorted, the songs lilliputian (averaging around two and a half minutes): fading out as they do, they catch you by surprise, irritating or delighting depending on taste.

The following year brought more songs, which the band released on a self-produced cassette not to be considered an "official" album: Ideas For Songs (Granted Passage Cassettes, 1997).

The air is still ironic and diaphanous, playful and "constrained" by makeshift technical means, but form and personality are starting to take shape (as shown, for instance, by the intense “You Can’t Go Home Again”).

In short, one begins to glimpse Bejar's magic ("The Terror Serves A Purpose", “Leaving London”, “It Is Me Who Will Rate You”). The whole thing is sharper, the voice, lost and sensitive, resembles in spirit the lovelorn laments of early Daniel Johnston. What redeems the formal poverty of these tracks is precisely their honesty, their peculiar cunning, even a certain inertia. “Why Banacek Doesn’t Love”, between a ringing electric guitar and a beat-poet voice, is the band's first track to break the five-minute mark.

1998 became the decisive year for Destroyer. The Canadian band lined up as a trio: Bejar on guitar, John Collins on bass, synth and electric guitar, and Scott Morgan (later of Loscil) on drums.

The line-up would remain unchanged until the new millennium.

The new album, City Of Daughters (Triple Crown Audio/Endearing, 1998), thus turned the page.

Though still sparse instrumentally, "feral" and direct in its communicativeness, it's by now compositionally mature and even melodically lavish.

City Of Daughters is the masterwork of the band's early period: it distills Bejar's visionary, figurative and vaguely grandiose art, the work of an author brimming with verve and given to instrumental solutions that are often intoxicating and unexpected.

At first the sound always presents itself as acoustic: Dan Bejar plays the part of a lost, wandering bard (voice and guitar); gradually wind instruments, percussion and keyboards arrive to help carry the expression forward.

Although several faces and balances coexist, it all feels plausible: City Of Daughters is the keystone that depicts the chrysalis in transition to its new form, and within that transformation lies all its potential, its lucid flash of insight.

Listening through it, what emerges is unmistakably a tight-knit band, directed by its leader in a minimal but meticulous way. "The Space Race", "I Want This Cyclops", "School, And The Girls Who Go There" and "Melanie And Jennifer And Melanie" are instinctive, naturalistic gems of folk-pop songwriting, comparable to the contemporary work of Songs:Ohia or the most inspired, lyrical and bewitching Mountain Goats (“Sweden”, 1995), or a more “equipped” Guided By Voices.

Thief (2000, Catsup Plate) marks the fresh start, the metamorphosis completed. The young creature rises up clear and elegant and takes flight; it dominates the space and shows itself off, intense and convincing.

Destroyer's line-up now adds drummer Jason Zumpano, from the band of the same name (later in Sparrow), and guitarist Stephen Wood, and the trick works wonderfully once again.

Thief is a record that “steals” the listener with emotional, vivid, showy songs, unleashing novelty-pop as only Robyn Hitchcock or a Bowie drunk on Beatles could conceive it; steeped in vivacity and passion, floating and set apart, the vivid colours of a fresco.

In this sense, the album offers a captivating opening trio that ranks among Bejar's finest conceptions: the melodic waves of "Destroyer's The Temple", "To The Heart Of The Sun On The Back Of A Vulture, I'll Go" and "The Way Of Perpetual Roads". Almost a single, surging, fevered suite, a dizzying, finely calibrated emotional rise and fall amid clusters of strings, organ and ravishing vocals.

At times this record feels like a blood relative of that masterpiece of predatory aggression and sentimental euphoria known as “Mass Romantic”, the debut by New Pornographers (2000, Mint Recordings), devised by Bejar together with a crowd of musicians from various backgrounds, including Carl Newman (from Zumpano) and frontgirl Neko Case (who went on to a successful solo career).

There's no shortage of lapses, “solo” digressions such as the classicist piano piece "Every Christmas", or the avant-experimental "I.H.O.J.", which echo the band's earliest cries.

By 2000 the band's talent is already mature, unmistakable and more explosive than ever. Bejar navigates confidently and without limits through a wide riverbed, backed by his fellow musicians of proven skill ("Death On The Festival Circuit", "Canadian Lover/Falcon's Escape", "Queen Of Languages").

Thief is a personal and emblematic work, a watershed between what has been and what is to come.

The following year, 2001, brings Streethawk: A Seduction (Misra), which hones in on the emotional inclinations and nods to Seventies pop-rock, restoring that elegance, that grit and that glamour, framing this “new course” at its best; devising ingenious formal solutions that enhance and illuminate the colours of the sound.

Telling is how the title track opens: “Hey girl, come on and take a whirl in my machine! (…) She said the city was dead and gutless. I cried for the city…”, almost a reworking of Bowie's “Suffragette City”.

This is the definitive arrival at a sophisticated, saturated pop-rock, reshaped in tone to suit the times. "The Bad Arts" and "Beggars Might Ride", which open the record, are examples that variously demonstrate, within refined and expansive arrangements, ambush and tenderness in acoustic tremors (the ode "Helena"), lavish ballad and power-pop instincts. In short, all the guises of a lush, mottled style ("The Very Modern Dance"), which at times favours solitary “solo” withdrawal and at times collective calls to arms.

Streethawk is a vital, meticulously crafted album, with a musical form that remains malleable and always able to break free of the images it evokes along the way, perceiving itself on multiple levels.

If "Virgin With A Memory" is an exotic acoustic piece that sounds like something Vinicius might have written, "The Sublimation Hour" has the flair and visions of Pavlov's Dog, while the piano on "The Crossover" is straight out of Elton John's "Yellow Brick Road". The peerless closing ballad "Strike" is then a synthesis of quiet/loud, an emblematic seal on Destroyer's chameleon-like nature.

2002 sees the Vancouver outfit land at Merge, the glorious North Carolina indie label with which they'll take the decisive leap into notoriety.

This pivotal development comes alongside another lineup change, now a quartet: besides Bejar (on guitars, piano, synth and melodica), there's Nicholas Bragg on guitar, Chris Frey on bass, and Fisher Rose on drums, violin, synth and piano.

Thus equipped, the Canadian group would embark on a world tour supporting Calexico.

This Night (Merge, 2002) is the album where the musical pace shifts too. The new songs come across as more ambitious and expansive, yet at the same time mysterious and restless – guitar sound dominates – without shying away from experimentation ("Holly Going Lightly", "This Night").

Songs like elaborate short films of nocturnal atmosphere (as the title aptly suggests), broad in scope. They're the dispatches of Dan Bejar's European travels, the outcome of meditations and jolts. The author intervenes according to whim, sifting through pop history both precisely and unpredictably, following his own mood and unusual versatility, building dramatic scenarios, deepening psychedelic moods and singer-songwriter legacies.

This particular attitude affects the album's overall length, twenty minutes longer than its predecessors. Critics, predictably caught off guard, are now perhaps more skeptical, but the audience rejoices, and rightly so: accessibility is hardly sidelined, and Bejar gives the impression of being able to do whatever he wants in the studio with his extremely rich "palette".

Formal accomplishment shines through and reaches its peak in tracks like "Makin' Angels" and "Modern Painters"; "Trembling Peacock", with its cadence, could belong to Stephen Malkmus or Ben Folds, while "The Chosen Few", fitted out with flamenco guitar, carries an atmosphere evoking the glories of Britain's él Records.

Touching is the acoustic dedication, anguished and piercing, of "Goddess Of Drought"; while the absorbed "Students Carve Hearts Out Of Coal" is captivating, enchanted by a guitar riff, a visionary organ and a performance seduced and swept away by "this night". A night traversed by the ambitious "Hey, Snow White", an epos-like ride of nearly eight minutes, the album's centerpiece. A distorted guitar in the background and the crooning "lost" in the flow: it would indeed feel like something from another era, but the author is skilled at disguising five minutes as two or three, and every weight becomes weightless.

Two years pass before arriving at Your Blues (2004, Merge), an album that continues down the path taken so far while also marking a new birth. It engages with baroque, decadent pop, confirming Destroyer as a reactionary group never detached from the pursuit of a new language, from the need for a personal style.

The opening track "Notorious Lightning", dark at first, then feverish and exultant, is a gut punch, a genuine dazzling.

"Oh, Notorious Lightning! Yes, I had to ride you

Now I’m facing twenty years for every night I tried to ingest the snow so lightly!”

The histrionic Bejar lets himself be tempted by the descriptive flair and the crescendo expressiveness of a Jarvis Cocker, or by freely reminiscent storyteller frescoes, but he never overuses or overplays his vocal gifts. He spares us pompous virtuosity, bringing (and centering) enviable measure and consistency to the series of luminous, in-depth melodies on this album.

Little or nothing remains of the rougher pop content of the New Pornographers outfit (the other band in which the author plays, while also turning out solid albums on his own): such seventies fetishes here instead center on Bowie the astral navigator, on the Thin White Duke at his most seductive and spontaneous, via Bowie.

But what stands out are his eccentric personal touches: Daniel, careful never to belittle or sacrifice everything on the altar of his own ego, never squanders or limits his potential for the sake of smug self-reference. Rather than indulging purely personal taste for citation and endless allusion, he privileges the listener's enjoyment.

Gifted with a genuine "troubadour" sensibility, Bejar also allows himself - without ever overdoing it - flourishes of pathos and infectious fascination, built on solid string sections that lend each track on the album its distinctive stamp. He proves just as shrewd a director, steering clear of kitsch symphonic excess (though surely mindful of his putative forefathers Jeff Lynne, Eric Carmen and Todd Rundgren).

The bacchanal of the opening "Notorious Lightning" gradually unveils a mosaic of vivid colors, branching out into an immensity of keyboards and drums. The restraint of the following "It's Gonna Take An Airplane" responds spontaneously by taking refuge in light, vaporous pop. The album's approach wards off any suspicion of indulgence or pretension that may have brushed against its predecessor This Night. "An Actor's Revenge" is another triumphant march through a scenery of drums, rhythms and mixed choirs on the move, led by a crooning worthy of Peter Gabriel.

Early Genesis-style arias also surface on "New Ways of Living", amid lyricism and dreamy keyboards, while elsewhere calibrated horns, clapping-led dances and joyous arcadian choirs light up "The Music Lovers", another textbook pop song, complete with a dazzling instrumental coda.

A pained, passionate and even "weird" performance marks the vivid landscapes of "From Oakland To Warsaw" with bright color; "What Road" starts out as a creative reworking of the Stevens-esque "Father And Son" before spreading out and rising into a "Seventies"-style suite, unveiling drapes of trumpets, strings and tolling bells.

The understated airs of "Certain Things You Ought To Know"... and "Turn Into Snow" bring a suggestive and memorable album to a beautiful close, a redemptive oasis made entirely of dazzling moments and climaxes.

Destroyer's Rubies (2006, Merge) is Destroyer's eighth LP, arriving a few months after the release of the EP Notorious Lightning And Other Works (2005, Merge). The latter is a curious little work made together with Victoria's own Frog Eyes (Destroyer's live backing band), on which Bejar reshapes six songs from the album Your Blues, sharpening their aggression and dismantling their pop-rock structure. The title track is all hysterical pulse, suspended, quasi-psychedelic guitar throbs that derail in the finale amid a possessed voice and an orgy of percussion, while "New Ways Of Living" has the inspired, neurotic verve of the Pixies. An appealing reissue that at times feels like a rewrite.

Destroyer's music is omnia-pop. Not unlike its studio predecessor, Destroyer's Rubies is yet another thrill, yet another triumph inspired by a thoroughbred songwriter. A more cohesive and structured record, less "disjointed" than its predecessors, it deftly weaves together chord changes, vocal flights of fancy (which the author himself calls his most accomplished), and "ruby-toned" tonalities - true to the title - now blazing, now subtle, forms married together with great skill.

Among them is the nerve to open with a "Destroyer-style" pop-suite - vivacious and elusive, like "Rubies": doggedly indie, a mix of emphasis and simplicity, it seems to rain down in clusters of crystalline chords to a percussive beat.

Balance is never lacking. Dan Bejar's visionary talent, feeding on every strain of 70s rock, reveals itself dazed, alluringly murky, romantic, yet always guided by a purpose. Take the shifts within the other medley, "Looter's Follies", an almost Stones-like slow number shot through with restless Television-like textures and distant Beach Boys echoes, or the thrilling melodies unleashed in "Painter In Your Pocket" and "Watercolors Into The Ocean".

Or again, the downpours of crisp piano notes on "European Blood"; while "Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever", dark yet limpid, sounds almost cut straight out of Bowie's "Aladdin Sane".

The classicism of "Your Blood" is a sequitur to Bob Dylan's album "Blood On The Tracks". Indeed, it's Bob Dylan's acrid, nervy style that peeks through here at times, revealing itself and shining within Bejar's classically-inclined miniatures, all in service of the exuberance and rejuvenation this record brings about.

Destroyer's records carry a sense of urgency and ancient memory, a melange with a long-forgotten charm within nostalgia-tinged pop-rock (and beyond). Bejar is undoubtedly self-aware, yet never condescending or weighed down by his own talent, and he never denies himself any possible solution. He could rightfully indulge in self-satisfaction, but he doesn't - and that, believe it, is a merit equal to the remarkable craftsmanship of his music.

On Trouble In Dreams (2008, Merge), a kind of "universal" song-form emerges - capable and persuasive, consistently inspired and visionary. Bejar makes a conscious break from past models and ideals, freeing himself completely to raise up his own distinct nature.

He is no longer merely a spokesman and herald of the pop-rock tradition, dialectically torn between old and new eras, whether rooted in the land of Albion or in American folk song. Bejar has by now become an alchemist striving toward his own individual model of pop classicism. A style with strong, specific features, built on a robust yet cautious authorial legacy made of turmoil and churning emotion, which skillfully moves the pieces and reshuffles the cards to inspire new, intriguing variations and captivating harmonic sophistication.

More effective and versatile than ever is Daniel's voice, whether it launches itself agitated and incisive over "The State" or "Rivers", or stalks seductively through "Foam Hands" or the brand-new "Blue Flower/Blue Flame". Or again, he appears as a steady guide on the refined, penetrating "Shooting Rockets (From The Desk Of Night's Ape)" and "Plaza Trinidad": majestic tracks propped up and stretched taut by searing guitar riffs or piano figures.

Trouble In Dreams is, on the whole, a descriptive, "panoramic" work, the outlet of reactions and syntheses with past albums, without ever being merely decorative or indulgent. Its particular harmonic dynamism serves as the gateway into a Lewis Carroll-esque realm, where everything is painted in passionate colors and, though plausible, altered. A place, in short, where every crossing is unpredictable, every passage rendered thrilling, as taught by the luminous sprawl of "Leopard Of Honor" and yet another passionate, unimprovable gem bearing the Destroyer stamp: "Dark Leaves From A Thread"; the ideal of pop songwriting simplicity carried to glory by a veritable arsenal of instruments in full celebration.

It's like becoming a child again, enchanted while listening to fairy tales whose outcome or twist you don't know, so that you feel real trepidation.

Unpredictable is the future awaiting Daniel Bejar and his many projects, in particular his favorite creation Destroyer, conceived together with his crew of friends, collaborators and musicians.

But the musical spectacle staged over these first twelve years deserves careful remembrance, respect and constant acclaim.

This is what Bejar ends up saying, then, in his collaboration with his drummer Scott Morgan, aka Loscil, on the latter's "Endless Falls", and on his own EP "Archer On The Beach", released in 2010 following "Bay Of Pigs" the previous year. These two releases find our man venturing into new territory, ambient in particular.

Many have thought that, with his last two releases, the two tasters of what's to come in the near future (in the already-announced "Kaputt", due out in early 2011), Dan Bejar had dedicated himself to the systematic "destruction" of himself, of his own musical moods, of that somewhat dandyish singer-songwriter persona, straight out of a downtown Vancouver loft richly furnished with books and chic trinkets. Made, like a fine wine for tasting, of instrumental nuances and lyrics with a pronounced literary flair.

And yet, in the end, it turns out that Destroyer is always the same. Perhaps such a dichotomous view will seem horrifying, but the feeling is that the two EPs released over these two years - this Archer On The Beach and last year's Bay Of Pigs - represent two opposing faces of the same musical, and even more so authorial, evolution.

In the previous case we had witnessed grandiose literary frescoes, in which Bejar managed, incredibly, to transcend both himself and the very concept of singer-songwriter. Bay Of Pigs is a track of sheer, sculpted visual power. From its metaphysical opening, in which Destroyer seemed to speak from inside the Kubrickian monolith, wrapped in the background hum of inner depths, Bejar gradually rebuilt his captivating delivery, and everything seemed to grow sharper, as electronic layers progressively piled up and returned the track to the rhythm of the world. A pensive walk along the bay of a Canadian fjord, collar turned up, thick hair blowing in the wind, free associations blossoming in a synaptic spring.

In short, the Destroyer brand was being rebuilt, that understated intellectual allure, indifferent to the world and, at the same time, open to it, which has always characterized him.

In Archer Of The Beach, the theme instead is stripping bare, an obsessive solitude, shut within the walls of a self-imposed, claustrophobic isolation. It's not simply a shift in mood, which would be entirely legitimate: it sounds like a willful regression, whereas Bay Of Pigs seemed instead like an admirable expansion of his expressive powers (also demonstrated in the reprise of "Ravers", from Trouble In Dreams).

The collaborations with contemporary ambient masters like Tim Hecker (on the title track) and Loscil (on the b-side "Grief Point") produce inhibiting effects, rather than the opposite.

The first track features a simple piano theme moving through a world submerged by storms that are not only meteorological but social as well. This seems to be an interpretation of thunder, of rain pouring down in the background, accompanied by the whistles and rhythmic hand-clapping of a crowd of protesters. But Bejar's hermetic phrasing (“Careful now, watch your step/ In you go!/ The Ash King’s made of ashes/ The Ice Queen’s made of snow…/ And Archer’s where you left him/ With his arrows stuck inside a peach…/ Awake on your crutches in the moonlight/ Archer on the Beach!”) no longer shines; it sounds instead like the incomprehensible mumbling of an Apocalypse prophet, misunderstood by most, hunting for disciples on street corners.

Then comes "Grief Point" to confirm and sharpen that impression. A spoken-word piece in which Destroyer recites, in a flat voice, from his own notebook, whose worn pages we can almost feel. The distressing sounds of an ambulance, a barking dog, an intercom buzzer punctuate Dan's doings: completing the picture of his nocturnal tale of exorcising his own depression (one excerpt: "I have lost interest in music. It is horrible.") is, naturally, the sound of whisky being poured into a glass full of ice. A rough night indeed! One that Loscil doesn't fail to underscore with a solemn funeral procession, back there behind the scenes...

The appetite for ambitious shifts shown on the two EPs is soon confirmed by a new full-length effort, the ninth in the series. The defining choice of Kaputt proves elegant and inviting right from the start, drawing liberally on soft eighties velvet and glitter, instantly beguiling with synthetic pulses and liquid reverb that sketch out a smooth lounge-soul sound embellished with sinuous sax lines. The effect is pleasing on opener "Chinatown" too, as is the studied contrast between the gleaming sonic dress of the songs and the post-apocalyptic imagery of many of the lyrics. This dichotomy recurs across much of the record, its subject matter left hanging between tributes to Beatles and New Order and ironic nods to the English music press, as well as between sharp glimpses of a decadent contemporary world and flashes of wit that end up tipping instead into self-satisfied narcissism ("This song for America, they told me it was clever", "I heard your record, it's alright").

On closer inspection, this is exactly the narrative thread of an album built on a double track: on one hand the sublimation of a fleeting pleasure, deliberately evoking a glossy retro aesthetic, and on the other a desecration of Western contemporaneity. The choice is certainly distinctive but, judging by the results, rather inconclusive — both in terms of the credibility of the overall effect and the effectiveness of a spare, disjointed songwriting that often withdraws into the background to make room for soft synthetic textures, halting guitar lines, extended sax digressions and pulses of sophisticated Eighties pop-dance. The idea itself isn't a bad one, and the sonic settings are indeed carefully crafted and successful, but their essential monotony, combined with the weakness of much of the material (with the partial exceptions of "Chinatown", "Savage Night At The Opera" and the Bowie-esque "Poor In Love"), soon slides into a flat, cloying feeling, leaving the firm impression that this time Bejar got a little too carried away with the urge to invent something different, focusing almost solely on the shape of a music polished with careful elegance yet unable to strike and win hearts beyond a surface level.

It was obvious that the sophisticated dandy garb worn by the man who, just two years earlier, had released Kaputt would soon start to feel too tight for this restless multi-instrumentalist — there was really no margin for error on that front. This time, though, the departure is even more radical than usual. "English in 2013 seems to have said everything it had to say. It's a good language for work transactions, but that's where it ends": as if to say that the overhaul this time round is even more substantial than in the past, and that the artistic "unease" of this Vancouver drifter has had to look even further afield to find relief for his own insatiability. The result, once again, fully mirrors its author.

With only Nicolas Bragg and John Collins of Destroyer coming to Bejar's aid this time (keyboardist Ted Bois is occupied solely with the record's photography), and numerous outside contributors rounding out the roster of musicians, Five Spanish Songs is, as the title suggests, a work performed entirely in Spanish, an EP that severs ties with the Anglo-Saxon tradition, paying tribute at last to Dan's distant homeland, never forgotten by him, cultivated even through the language itself. If anything, what's surprising is the manner of the tribute: no recourse to Latin guitars, no flamenco steps, nothing whatsoever in the sound that might even distantly recall warm Iberian settings. For the occasion, the Vancouver artist went digging through some of the finest songs of Antonio Luque, the Seville singer-songwriter who, with his band Sr. Chinarro, wrote some of the most important pages in Spanish-language pop. It fell to Bejar to arrange and rework them to suit his own sensibility, giving them his unmistakable touch, that cosmopolitan-indie attitude that has defined his career.

A touch that, sadly, convinces very little this time: the songwriting is certainly of high quality ("Maria de las nieves", a lulling pop synesthesia with a strongly dreamy production, and "Bye Bye", performed here entirely acoustic, are anything but insignificant tracks), and Bejar's compositional refinement remains notably strong (listen to the samba-funk cut that shapes a more propulsive "Babieca", or the bite unsheathed by the guitar in the rock swagger of "El rito"), but what the songs lack is a truly decisive reinterpretation from the performer himself, a performance that really leaves its mark.

Within songs so rigorously structured, Dan's voice, more accustomed to evocative streams of consciousness, fails to find its most natural setting, almost becoming a caricature of itself, not helped by the choice of a language that sits poorly with his faint, intimate-storyteller timbre. The passion inherent in the originals, in short, struggles to come through here with the same intensity, and the intricate lyricism of Luque's lyrics feels almost distorted in this context.

This return to roots, in short, could use some rethinking: it's not far off needing to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Bejar presses on undeterred, pursuing his own ideal of music detached from current trends and the contingencies of the moment. The world unveiled by Poison Season (2015) is an Eden for incurable romantics, one not as immediately accessible as that of Kaputt, whose new romantic sheen it dials back a decade to rediscover the universe of the '70s. Not that the '80s have vanished entirely: they peek through, for instance, in the big music of "Dream Lover", the massive single with a Waterboys whiff that takes the velvety saxes of "Kaputt" and sends them careening into a woozy, deliriously overexcited sonic whirlwind. But the record's masterpiece is "Forces From Above", a chamber-pop piece with a spiritual bent, featuring a masterful, almost cinematic string section that offsets the pulse of percussion redolent of MPB and the roundness of a funky bassline. The following trio of tracks is less effective: "Hell" is a miniature version of "Forces From Above", and can only look like a mouse next to such a gem; though more conventional and classicist, "The River" better captures a quiet melancholy, one of Destroyer's many stances against the frenzy of city life, which it urges listeners to flee. A surreal, faintly dark music video accompanies "Girl In A Sling", translating its story of isolation and alienation into evocative 'landscapes' of abandoned, desolate suburbs.

"Times Square", the definitive ode to New York City, shines like a certain gleaming '70s soft-rock, amid festive saxes and none-too-veiled Bowie-esque echoes. Another high point of a record that perhaps doesn't sustain the same quality throughout its length, but when it hits, it enchants. And so, between nocturnal funk ("Archer On The Beach"), unruly rock'n'roll ("Midnight Meet The Rain") and brooding urban ballads ("Bangkok"), there's an inimitable classy atmosphere that's genuinely hard to resist, even where it takes on a touch of mannerism.

Confirming his renewed creative streak, just two years later Dan announces the new album Ken, yet another piece of an obstacle-strewn artistic path, another step forward in the fascinating, hushed synergy between the power of words and the fragility of music that has become something of a trademark for the Canadian band.

The premise is intriguing, since the new Destroyer album does away with the string flourishes and soul-jazz horns of Poison Season, in favour of lean, menacing electronic textures that bring back into play the dark edges and contagious pop harmonies of bands like New Order or Prefab Sprout.

The game of quotations and references is nothing new for Dan Bejar, but this time everything is slightly more cheeky and unruly, while the songs flow with greater ease and incisiveness, turning back the clock from the '70s to the '80s.

There's the same harmonic force of Prefab Sprout's "When Love Breaks Down" in "Sky's Grey", or the same folk-pop taste of Dream Academy in the delightful refrain of "Sometimes In The World", while "Tinseltown Swimming In Blood" once again pulses with the dark dance textures of New Order's "Blue Monday".

Within this parade of references, which may well irritate Bejar's detractors, there's a light theatricality that eases the tension, letting glam, pop, dark and electronic sounds flow between Cure-like sonic situationism ("In The Morning", "Ivory Coast") and unexpected folk-psych ballads that could easily have come off a Robyn Hitchcock record ("Saw You At The Hospital") or a Momus one ("A Light Travels Down The Catwalk").

Once again, amid the gleam of guitar sounds and the chiaroscuro of electronics, that lovely synergy that has always underpinned lyrical creations of varied lineage is renewed, and between joyful glam-pop textures ("Cover From The Sun") and ambitious noir textures ("Rome"), one of the most compelling sonic portraits the Canadian band has ever produced comes into full focus.

While passing pop trends come and go, Dan Bejar's art is crystallized in a timeless dimension, with no defined space except an inner one, that of the soul. Because you can travel through all the capitals of the world, admire their glitter and festive mood. But deep down Bejar tells us that, at the end of the day, we are all hopelessly alone.

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