DESTROYER - Archer On The Beach Ep

An artist's life is hard: he's even forced to communicate the fact that, in truth, he himself doesn't want to communicate. Many will think that, with his last two releases — two previews of what's coming in the near future (on the already announced "Kaputt", due out early next year) — Dan Bejar has devoted himself to the systematic "destruction" of himself, of his own musical moods, of that slightly dandy singer-songwriter persona, the one living in a loft richly furnished with books and the chic trappings of downtown Vancouver. Made, like a fine wine for tasting, of instrumental nuances and lyrics with a distinctly literary flavor.

And yet, in the end, it turns out that Destroyer is always the same. Such a dichotomous view might 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 one and 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 the singer-songwriter. "Bay Of Pigs" is a track of sheer, sculpted visual power. From its metaphysical opening, in which Destroyer seemed to speak from within the kubrickian monolith, enveloped in the background noise of inner depths, Bejar gradually rebuilt his fascinating delivery, and everything seemed to grow sharper, in the progressive electronic layering that returned the track to the rhythm of the world. A pensive walk along the bay of a Canadian fjord, collar turned up and thick hair in the wind, free associations blossoming into 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 away, an obsessive solitude, shut within the walls of a self-imposed, claustrophobic isolation. It's not simply a reversal of mood, which would be entirely legitimate: it sounds like a capricious regression, whereas "Bay Of Pigs" seemed instead like a remarkable strengthening of his expressive powers (also shown in the reworking 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"; worth recalling that Scott Morgan, aka Loscil, is also his drummer, and this track already appeared, in a reworked version, on Morgan's own "Endless Falls") 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 too. This seems to be an interpretation of the thunder, of the rain pouring in the background, accompanied by the whistles and the rhythmic hand-claps 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 like the incomprehensible muttering of an Apocalypse prophet, misunderstood by most, seeking followers on street corners.

Then comes "Grief Point" to confirm and sharpen the feeling. A spoken word piece in which Destroyer declaims, in a flat voice, from his own commonplace book, whose worn pages we can almost feel. The anguished 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! One that Loscil doesn't fail to underscore with a solemn funeral procession, back there behind the scenes…

And yet you don't convince us, Dan: we're sure that in a few years you'll look back on this release and secretly laugh about it.

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18/11/2010