Dan Bejar is a man who acts upon impulse, often a seemingly contrarian one,and has named his band Destroyer's new album Ken after the original title of Suede's The Wild Ones...who knew? I have read a lot of interviews with the man and usually end them considerably less the wiser, though a few more rabbit holes and blind alleys are signposted.
Mr Bejar has always been an anglophile, and says that much of the album could be seen as him singing to his teenage self, listening to British indie bands of the late eighties, and that's a way in if you want it. The first song, Grey Skies, finds him "working on the new Oliver Twist", which could be about the last gasps of Thatcher-ism and its legacy, or America today or...who knows?
The first time I listened to ken - maybe I didn't ken it - I thought, this is the first Destroyer album that sounds like Destroyer. Like Bowie, each subsequent album since I started listening to them around the time of Rubies has sounded like Destroyer sounding a bit like someone else. This one is more direct, less shrouded in someone else's cape, but that doesn't make it obvious, even if it is full of lifts from popular song and trademark offhand profanity. Destroyer's drummer Josh Wells produces. I have not doubted his commitment to the Destroyer cause since I saw him smash his snare drum live with the band a couple of years ago. Mr Bejar talks of the album's musical similarity to The Cure, but having a drummer in the producer's chair has not upped the rhythmic component significantly. Maybe it is trying to answer the question " How could a decrepit-sounding voice sing in a New Romantic world?" Maybe its more like New Order circa Low Life. There are a couple of tracks with Hooky melodic bass-lines, and the lyrics have that albrechtian tossed-off profundity. Who can tell?
I am tending to think that maybe Mr Bejar has pulled off his most audacious trick here, and by abandoning some of the seeming artifice - the annexing of Avalon era Roxy and eighties Van Morrison for Kaputt or the blending of Springsteen in his Wild, Innocent, E St Shuffle phase and loaded era Lou Reed with Stephen Sondheim and still avoiding sounding like Street Hassle for Poison Season - he has ostensibly produced his most straightforward collection, but one that beguiles and deludes as much as it seems to offer straight-ahead enjoyment accessible to the casual listener. The very directness of it is a deception.
Early adopters who bought the custard yellow vinyl album were gifted a single of two Ken tracks in acoustic form. The songs shine in that format too. There is , somewhere, an Alternate Ken, as good as but singularly different to the creature out in the world. As Mr Bejar says, he is just in the corner doing poet's work.
The album ends with La Regle Du Jeu, which is as catchy as they come. I'll let the author explain it. "I thought if I did sing to America, I wanted to do it in a language that they didn't understand - or that they possibly actively hated. I thought French would be good for that." I am at the point of being entranced by the mystery of Ken, and I dinnae ken it. There's much mileage yet in it's attractive surface.
