A Week With Destroyer's "Trouble In Dreams": Day 3
29 May 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Allison Felus // Illustration by Josh Johnson
One of the most awesomely unexpected things that it’s always easy to forget when approaching a new Destroyer album is just how funny Dan Bejar is. There’s nary a straight-up punch line in sight and a lot of the time the laughter feels suspiciously like either gagging on something sour in the back of your throat or chuckling with nervous dread in the face of the really nasty-bad circumstances about to erupt all around you, but still, the humor is there.
Lyrically, it’s there, for example, in his frequent and hilariously petulant use of the word “shit” (surely one of the funniest of all vulgarities), his interjections of conversational banalities (the “OK, fine” that kicks off the whole album, the “no, it’s cool. You go. I’ll stay” in “Dark Leaves Form a Thread,” the parenthetical “who cares, I didn’t mean it” in “Shooting Rockets”) and even his top-of-the-lungs embrace of all those la-dah-dah and bah-bah-bah nonsense syllables. (I was really struck by this last fact the first time I ever saw them play live, when confronted with the reality of these talented, fiercely intelligent grown men lustily belting out a series of falsetto nah-nah-nahs on stage. Clearly ridiculous but also wonderful.)
But the broadest comedy usually comes from the song forms themselves. As mentioned previously, I don’t think we, as listeners, are being intentionally or explicitly made fun of if we find ourselves genuinely enjoying some of the barfier chord progressions or tongue-in-cheek guitar or organ lines, but there’s also no way we’re supposed to take that stuff solely at face value either. “Introducing Angels” may sound like Air Supply, yes, but it’s also like this close to being something David Brent would have written in the “Free Love Freeway” mode on the other end of the spectrum, with those comically breathless ah-ah background sighs and its deliberate, even ironically aggressive, sonic build and crescendo aping the fumbling, unreflective “love story” being mechanically acted out in the lyrics. (Am I the only person who reads those “common scars” as belly buttons? Ahem.)
“My Favorite Year” can barely keep a straight face as it sends up the idea that “the whole point of everything’s the ‘moving on’” (yes, those scare quotes around “moving on” are included in the lyric sheet, wink-wink). There’s only about a minute’s worth of actual singing here, and it’s bracketed on either side with a simple vamp that just gets repeated over and over for almost the first two full minutes of the song and then again for about the last three. And just to really kick the notion of progress in the teeth, there’s the chilling “beware the company you reside in!” chant injected in the middle of the middle like some psychotic worm-filled core at the center of the apple. And of course Bejar can’t resist a final “one, two, one, two, three, four” count-in after a fake-out ending that refuses to take the song anywhere new or significant in its final 50 seconds before the actual fade. Yes, this is all really funny over headphones.
And, not to keep returning to “Shooting Rockets” (even though it seems Bejar himself can’t resist returning to it either, after having already recorded an arguably inferior version with Swan Lake), but the completely over-the-top mid-80s melodrama of this “power ballad” (imagine Lionel Richie crooning the phrase “I was partial to the feeling” and you’ll see where I’m coming from) is really the only thing buoying the dark heart of this song enough to make it bearable. And not just bearable, but poignantly, pathetically (in the true sense of inciting pathos) beautiful.
With his studied and deliberate lack of demonstrative passion, the old chestnut about needing to laugh to keep from crying isn’t really an appropriate way to read what Bejar’s doing with his humor here. But it’s also refreshing to confront smirking sangfroid as something closer to a defense against disappearing down the rabbit hole than the standard (and, yes, stereotypical) indie rock defense mechanism against feeling anything in the first place.
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