What is a dance record? An album that sounds like a discotheque? Or an album with lots of dance songs in it? It may sound strange but Dan Bejar aligns himself with the supporters of the first thesis. Although almost all of the songs on the band’s new album ‘Labyrinthitis’ (Bella Union / PIAS) Destroyer, push to move without hesitation, for him this is not about ‘dancing’ music. And he says it’s persuasive, because when he started designing this new work, his initial intention was definitely to make an album for it, to dance. “As Donna Summer’s ‘biggest hits’,” she says in the press release, which mentions what her initial intentions were. Something must have gone wrong afterward, because it didn’t quite work out for him.
“When I think of dance music, it’s more of a continuous rhythm 4×4. [el de la música ‘house’, por ejemplo], with a very strong kick and bass. And this record doesn’t remind me of what to listen to in a club. Or maybe yes, but one from 35 years ago, not today,” Bejar explains as he stretches out on the sofa in his home. Vancouverwith his old, worn wool coat and his characteristic long curly hair, he takes up almost the entire Zoom screen. The journalist claims that apart from the opening song of the album, it is a seven-minute overture with a psychedelic symphony at a slow tempo, and the last one is a basic folk exercise with voice and guitar. Feet gone song download. And with some, even arms. The musician smiles. “I’m so glad that people can dance with him. But not as he expected. My original idea, talking to John [Collins, su principal socio en la banda] was to make a traditional techno recording. And it feels more like a recording to me Rock. While it’s true that it’s a very fast-paced album for Destroyer,” he admits.
Contrary to what it might seem from this talk, Destroyer is not an electronica band randomly releasing a rock album. Destroyer is a rock or pop band that has released a very lively album (Bejar doesn’t really like the second term). Quite dark but very rhythmic and with traces of ‘rave’, ‘electro’, ‘new’ and ‘no wave’, even the most dancing part of some Kings of Easy. And it accelerated because the Destroyer got used to halftime and breaks rather than pacing its audience. So this album represents a new twist in his sound. a band that does something different without losing a drop of personality on every album. It has the Destroyer sound, but no Destroyer formula.
elegant rock
destroyer One of the important names of American ‘indie’, understanding ‘indie’ not as a specific sound, but as an endless galaxy of different bands broadcasting in independent companies and acting on a non-major league circuit of festivals, radios and concert halls. It’s a very personal project of an Andalusian musician (his parents are a Granada with the surname Béjar and a Spanish teacher from California settled in Vancouver) who, in his current career, started his own musical project as a singer-songwriter in the mid-nineties. His stage name combined with his participation in several bands (The New Pornographers, Swan Lake) that would later form part of the big wave of Canadian indie. Conquering the world with names like at the turn of the century foot, peaches or if: Arcade Fever.
Bejar honed his voice over the years until he reached that elegant and sophisticated rock where a person approaching forty is expected to do their homework and do their homework. And so in 2011 he released an album called ‘Kaputt’ that summed up the whole process: the singer presented himself in the patterns of a modern ‘crooner’, with bittersweet pop wrapped in elegant jazz arrangements, with texts with just the right amount of irony. and double meanings and an image where the ‘blazer’ is mandatory.
This whole ethical and aesthetic apparatus is what it has sustained to this day. In ‘Labyrinthite’ there is a song called ‘The States’, in which Bejar evokes his 20s self and remembers the time he spent at bus stops with an old suitcase during the months he lived, again in 2007. Malaga. When asked what the younger version of himself would think of him if he saw him now, Bejar answers without hesitation: “I am corrupt, that my words were sold and I became a bourgeois” he says between laughter.
However, Destroyer is a project that takes up very little space. Bejar is a kind of musical explorer.instinctive rather than rational John Collins, the alchemist who then adds the endless layers of sound each of them has. An excellent partner because he is not limited to agreeing with you. In fact, this album is “the best and most violent example of John turning things upside down, the album he left the most mark on as a producer”.
Spanish future
‘Labyrinthite’, which is the name of a disease that affects hearing and balance and which Bejar suffers mildly, is an album that its author describes as quite rare and says that he feels like a foreigner. “I’m the singer, but it’s unfamiliar to me. Many of the things I say are rude, It’s like singing in a bad guy’s voice. It’s a dark album, but not the typical Destroyer darkness that would be more melancholic or anti-romantic. I’m making some very dirty jokes here.”
It’s not clear if this darkness is a result of the pandemic (he composed the songs in the hardest part, spring 2020) or just because of his own vital moment. “I’m turning 50 this year and it’s a time when you’re starting to see how the world you know is slowly being erased. Memories fade and you wonder things like: ‘Will I ever fall into a bar with someone making noise on stage?’ All these experiences that are important to me… will I feel them again?
In these typical reflections of the midlife crisis (although he says it passed a few years ago), Spain also appears. “I will play this summer [en el Vida Festival, el 2 de julio]but the older I get, the more I think about spending longer periods there. I still have a lot to learn, I’ve only been to Andalusia, Catalonia and Madrid”. He went so far in 2013 that he went so far as to say he found English “an inadequate language to sing” and made an EP called ‘Five Spanish Songs’ ‘, he sang five songs in Spanish by Mr. Chinarro, a musician he had never met but discovered years ago by a cousin from Seville. They said it was just an excuse. What I wanted was to face what I hadn’t written.
In ‘Labyrinthite’, Bejar’s characteristic voice adopts different tones and modulations. There is an instrumental theme (which is the album title) and a theme with endless lyrics (‘June’) where the singer raps. “Sounds like ‘In Tintoretto, For You’ rammsteinHe jokes when the only ones I listen to at home are Bill Evans and Billie Holiday.”