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Destroyer
Trouble in Dreams
Merge,
2008
Genre:
Indie Rock , Art Rock Buy this CD
from:
Merge Records
Rating:
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| All Destroyer albums take time to burrow into the subconscious. Dan Bejar is teaching us his unique language one album at a time and the more we learn how to decipher his glyphs, the more rewarding the lesson. Trouble in Dreams is his most instantly likable release yet. With this, his ninth album under the Destroyer heading, his integration into a band setting is total and offers a striking contrast to the one man and his midi masterpiece Your Blues. On Rubies Bejar made strides toward an organic musical unity but his individuality still stood out in bold relief from the rest of the picture creating a delectable tension. Here working with the same band all is blended into a frothy, head-swirling concoction. If this was your introduction to Destroyer you would have no way of knowing that this is an individual's showcase easily assuming that instead it was an incredibly supple indie band fronted by a rather idiosyncratic character, which in fact Destroyer now is. A collective of non-equals perhaps, but a collective nonetheless.
The subdued lilt of opener "Blue Flower/Blue Flame" defies expectation by remaining just that for its full running time. Typically Bejar would have cracked the song open midway through with an exhilaratingly messy guitar riff but here he lets the song be, which while at first seems almost disappointing actually ends up feeling like a more authentic approach. This "getting out of the way" of the songs is a common thread throughout Trouble in Dreams and an atypical one from a man who usually leaves indelible fingerprints all over his work. This new found ease of expression is in evidence in "Dark Leaves from the Thread" where the words roll off of Bejar's tongue like an incantation and "Rivers" where his lyrical flow matches that of the titular body of water. Elsewhere "My Favorite Year" glides on shoegazing atmospherics and a motorik rhythm and wouldn't sound out of place on David Bowie's Low. While "Shooting Rockets" touches on epic prog-inflected grandiosity with striking results. The closing duo of "Plaza Trinidad" with its arch, disaffected swagger and the bathed-in-grace poignancy of "Libby's First Sunrise" point to Destroyer's mastery of disparate styles and moods.
Dan Bejar once commented to the effect that the spaces in between meanings are where you stick the poetry. On Trouble in Dreams there are a plethora of spaces created in which to find the sadness, beauty, absurdity and hope of a seemingly endless and yet all too brief cycle of sunrises and sunsets. A fellow believer in the idea that art should be the proper task of life once echoed Bejar's sentiment through the ineffable medium of space and time by writing "when one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets". And there, my fellow travelers, is where you stick the poetry.
Reviewed
by: fallingman
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