Can you weave yourself into a tapestry that\u2019s already finished?<\/p>\n
Depending on how you were introduced, Dan Bejar was either the genius behind Destroyer, a cryptic child of Dylan and Hunky Dory era Bowie, or the shaggy dadaist playing foil to AC Newman\u2019s bubbly pop in the New Pornographers. Halfway through the \u201800s, the Pornos had become indie darlings, beloved in their native Canada and sprawling into broader pop culture thanks to 2000\u2019s breakout\/debut Mass Romantic.
Bejar burned the candle at both ends. By the time 2006 rolled around, he had been a major player or soloist on seven albums in six years. Steel sharpened steel. His own bewildering mind had, by osmosis, pilfered Newman\u2019s most pop particularities, and though he never tried the same sort of howl that fellow Pornos songwriter Neko Case could unleash, he did tap into her mystic imagery. And he realized he was in the middle of a new canon being created.<\/p>\n
Destroyer\u2019s Rubies, released 20 years ago today in the States, was a welcome, baffling evolution from Bejar. His nostalgic revelries began to take on modern forms without ever forgetting the foundations. Opener \u201cRubies\u201d sprawls out in luxurious splendor, starting the album on a note of surreal yet tangible worry. \u201cDueling cyclones jackknife \/ They got eyes for your wife \/ And the blood that lives in her heart,\u201d Bejar sings over two crunchy guitars emulating those steely tornados.
\u201cRubies\u201d is the entire album in miniature. Over its nine minutes, there\u2019s a snatched guitar lick from Guided By Voices\u2019 \u201cTeenage FBI,\u201d and Bejar quips about Otis Redding, Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Beatles, before cheekily quoting his previous album Your Blues, sneaking himself into rarified company. This mishmash of influences and time makes Destroyer\u2019s Rubies wonderfully anachronistic. It\u2019s a soiree where The Spiders from Mars and GBV exchange notes on guitar tones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bejar\u2019s constant self-referencing doesn\u2019t come from a place of loathing or ego-stroking. Instead, he agrees with fellow vagabond Bill Callahan who, the year before, sang \u201cI did not become someone different \/ I did not want to be.\u201d Both asserted that any evolution was natural and part of a continuum, but Bejar\u2019s timeline stretches far and wide. Ted Bois\u2019 saloon-style piano, which dominates \u201cYour Blood\u201d and opens \u201cEuropean Oils,\u201d conjures images of Bejar lounging over a Wurlitzer in Prohibition-era New York\u2014but then, on \u201cEuropean Oils,\u201d the chiming near-schmaltz is broken wide open by a self-described \u201cmonster riff\u201d that would\u2019ve fit on a Wolf Parade record.<\/p>\n
Sift through Bejar\u2019s lyrics and you\u2019ll find a strange mythos about the Atlantic divide. Born to a Spaniard and an American but raised in Canada, Bejar perhaps inevitably had an obsession with his lineage. Europe was an exotic, fading beauty, the States an alluring and dangerous place filled with conmen. \u201cFounding fathers, what did you find?\u201d are the last words he slurs on the album. Elsewhere he giggles \u201cI left England to the English,\u201d before briefly visiting Italy during a \u201cmildly successful killing rampage.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s just your precious American Underground \/ And it is born of wealth \/ With not a writer in the lot,\u201d he smirks on \u201cRubies,\u201d taking shots at indie nepo babies while still worshiping at the altar of American rock stardom.
On \u201cEuropean Oils,\u201d Bejar attempts the seduction of some Old World beauty, only to be denied by fate and blood. \u201cI made a tomb for all the incompatible cells I could take,\u201d he opens with a sigh as Nicolas Bragg\u2019s fading guitar hangs in the air like a hot breeze. There\u2019s a (miraculously) straightforward story to be read about a doomed romance, but it\u2019s just as likely that Bejar was turning the mirror on himself. His dad grew up in Francoist Spain, and Bejar was only born a few years before the dictatorship collapsed, giving the \u201cDeath to the murderers we\u2019ve loved all our lives!\u201d line a historical and morbid taste.<\/p>\n