Destroyer: Dan's Boogie (Vinyl LP)

What is a “boogie”? In the common tongue, it’s a dance or an occasion to dance. This being a Destroyer album and not the common tongue, the implications of a title like Dan’s Boogie are at once more alluring and dangerous.

Contradiction informs much of Dan’s Boogie, the fog swirling around Bejar illuminated by the friction between competing truths and tastes, as when his interest in jazzy ballads runs aground on producer and bassist John Collins’ interest in bands like Led Zeppelin and Scritti Politti. When Bejar told Collins that he was thinking of Sammy Davis Jr., the title track bloomed into being, Bejar adopting a Rat Pack swagger with almost delusional glee against a dreamy soundscape of soaring guitars, lush horns, jazz drumming, spaced-out synths, and, perhaps truest to how Bejar sees himself, plinking lounge piano.

In terms of shaping sound, the centerpiece of Dan’s Boogie may be “Cataract Time,” an eight-minute epic that ranks as some of the heaviest lyrics Bejar has ever written, and one of Destroyer’s most musically intricate compositions. Borne aloft on an easygoing groove, Bejar’s lyrics are transfigured, their melancholy tasting almost counterintuitively like hope. It’s an intimate song that puts away Destroyer’s usual urban fable milieu in exchange for bracing interiority, but its lilting groove can see a future, one that Bejar and his band are eager to meet.

Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, Dan’s Boogie dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar’s eye may be on the exits, but he’s not leaving anytime soon.

Black vinyl version.

1. The Same Thing as Nothing at All
   
2. Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World
   
3. The Ignoramus of Love
   
4. Dan’s Boogie
   
5. Bologna [feat. Fiver]
   
6. I Materialize
   
7. Sun Meet Snow
   
8. Cataract Time
   
9. Travel Light