On Your Blues, Dan Bejar, the crazily-talented Canadian singer-songwriter and sometime member of supergroup New Pornographers, returns to his earlier, multi-tracked, Paul McCartney-as-a-poststructuralist self. The result is lovely. This is pop music that revels in cagey wordplay and references to other songs and art in a manner that's almost completely unpretentious. It's postmodern and deliciously decadent, but more in an '80s way than a self-consciously Brechtian or Symbolist one. The best part is that Bejar puts so many hooks in each song, it's difficult to avoid bad puns involving bait and tackle shops. Songs such as "Don't Become the Thing You Hated" and "The Music Lovers" are MIDI folk-rock, the joyous soundtrack to cultural apocalypse. Fans of Serge Gainsbourg, Marc Bolan, Young Marble Giants, Style Council, Felt, Magnetic Fields, and the Aluminum Group, step right up! Your Blues is easily among the best pop albums of
2004. --Mike McGonigal
Destroyer
Your Blues
[Merge; 2004]
Rating: 8.6
Let me get this off my chest right away: Your Blues, the latest album from Vancouver-based singer/songwriter and New Pornographers contributor Daniel Bejar, could be the soundtrack for a Sega Genesis game about kittens studying post-structuralism. It is host to unapologetic MIDI instrumentation, glaringly theatrical vocals, and that ubiquitous but rarely implemented synth preset called "aah voice." Much more so than with any other Destroyer album, the aesthetic of Your Blues can be intensely jarring, and will likely annoy the fuck out of many, many people.
Ultimately, though, it's the most initially vexing aspects of Your Blues that prove the most endearing, memorable, and surprisingly touching. Like Bejar's 2002 release This Night, Your Blues constitutes a fundamental challenge to deeply ingrained conventions of sincerity and emotional honesty. The record's conceptual brilliance lies largely in Bejar's ability to craft deeply moving passages out of ostensibly artificial and contrived elements, subtly suggesting that all music, if not all human expression, is in effect some sort of artifice. Bejar's critical engagement with codified aesthetic techniques certainly renders Your Blues a less immediately "accessible" record, and can at first come off as kitschy or detached. But the album's unique and defiant expression makes this the most holistically accomplished album Bejar has released to date.
Though it's a conceptually fascinating record, it would be unfair to write off Your Blues as a "concept album," or to suggest that its atypical aesthetic renders it unlistenable. Without a doubt, it's the songs here, not the conceptual meaning that could be read into them, that constitutes the core of the album's appeal. In fact, Bejar's newfound ability to conjure a plastic orchestra allows many of these songs to achieve a textural and structural richness only hinted at on previous albums. "The Music Lovers", previously released as a Sub Pop Singles Club seven-inch, benefits greatly from this treatment, as rising lines of synthesized strings grant the song a terse harmonic complexity absent from its more previous incarnation. "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" is an exercise in pure melodic elegance, a sing-songy, cleverly composed construction of bright acoustic guitars, multitracked vocals, and warm, evocative synthesizers.
Elsewhere, Bejar's songwriting takes on a more grandiose bent. The album's opening track, "Notorious Lightning", finds Bejar sing-speaking his way through a string of vague-yet-striking images, slowly building to a rousing, anthemic finale. Framed by fake tympani, strings, and snare drums, Bejar sings, "And someone's got to fall before someone goes free," his voice carrying an unrestrained, fist-clenched passion never before present in a Destroyer song. "Notorious Lightning", like many songs on Your Blues, has a markedly theatrical quality to it, its breathy vocal delivery and artificial orchestral arrangements landing somewhere between Stephin Merritt and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Like Merritt, Bejar explores the emotional momentum that these theatrical forms can evoke, reinforcing this connection with a computerized simulacrum of bombastic arrangements.
Lyrically, Bejar is at the top of his game, his words reinforcing his musical play on artifice in lines like, "Warm yourself by the fiery stage/ Fiery 'cause I lit it," and most notably, "Always the play, never the thing." The song "An Actor's Revenge" borrows its title from a Japanese movie, but replaces the film's visceral and dramatic plot with a more general and pointed discussion of impersonation, sincerity, and frivolity. On "What Road", Bejar hijacks a Smiths lyric, whispering, "There is a light and it goes... out," before an ascending swell of synth-strings ushers in a forceful coda, with Bejar hissing, "Your backlash is right where I wanted you," a clever (whether or not intentional) address to his potentially befuddled audience. Oftentimes, Bejar's delivery evokes Thunder Perfect Mind-era Current 93, only more fangy and melodic, and with substantially fewer lyrics about dragons.
Certainly, those hoping for a return to the more straightforward Destroyer of yore will initially be put off by Your Blues. But it's hard to see Bejar's refusal to backtrack as a creative hindrance. A full six albums into his career, Daniel Bejar is making a compelling case for self-doubt as a fine art-- not content to rest on the fractured charm of City of Daughters, the formal, classicist brilliance of Streethawk: A Seduction, or the epic, perverted rock-isms of This Night, Bejar has made his bravest and most iconoclastic album to date. Now, finally, the bandname begins to make sense.
-Matt LeMay, March 15th, 2004
Review by John D. Luerssen
Recorded with the production duo JC/DC (aka David Carswell and John Collins) -- who aided in the creation of Destroyer's first three discs -- Dan Bejar ditches the band format he used for 2002's This Night with tremendous results. Fusing a dramatic vocal style akin to that of David Bowie in the 1970s with 1980s studio achievers like Microdisney and Prefab Sprout, Your Blues is regularly breathtaking. Launched with the strummed guitar of "Notorious Lightning," Behar soon expands on his vision with the bright, synth-conceived orchestration of "An Actor's Revenge" and the fabulous, adventurous pop of "The Music Lovers." Sure, the long a cappella intro on the title cut is hard to take, but Destroyer's records are never without a challenge or two. Still, Behar quickly redeems himself with the tongue-in-cheek "New Ways of Living," which pokes fun at mid-'80s pop drama queens with lyrical and musical finesse. The flute-laced "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" is the high point here, with lyrics like "Baby, you were born to be seen/And art's just the start," but late-model standouts like the Hunky Dory-inspired "What Road" and the haunting closer, "Certain Things You Ought to Know," all help make Your Blues 2004's early front-runner for art rock album of the year.
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