Dan Bejar's long-swapped 1996 debut sounds about as good as primitive lo-fi folk can on this reissue, which doesn't mean that I'd recommend it to anyone not already obsessed with Destroyer or not already a student of how so many of the previous decade's home-tapers blossomed into the indie titans of today. Maybe this was always a "fake" lo-fi album, though, about the aesthetic's endeavors and limits: Much of the playing seems forcedly "bad" to the point of risking annoyance. "Revolution" is a near exact rip of an early Pavement tune. The refrain of the limp waltz "Saddestroyer" is, "I heard you were guided by voices." The ballad-with-a-heart-murmur "Rose" announces, "Static means punk/ Tuning is junk." The kiddie instruments, stilted strumming, aborted-banshee melodica, and somnolent vocals accrue to imply that Bejar was consciously handicapping his folk (just as he synthed out his rock for Your Blues). That several choruses rise from the wreckage to have a kind of muted-sea-shanty power is testimony to his talent with incidental hooks.
Bejarologists will find most of the touchstones of Bejar's later work evident: Impressively clever puns, odes to lost mini-empires, the juxtaposition of the grandly axiomatic with the penetratingly personal, songs containing other bands' names and lyrics. Four songs even bear the titles of staples by the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Judas Priest, and Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton. Is Bejar paying homage with these gestures? Is he snubbing the notion of a word or phrase being "owned" and thus unusable forevermore? Can he not be bothered with maintaining a burden of freshness for its own sake? Or is he just acknowledging how much of his brainspace is crowded with late-20th century English-language rock and pop?
Listeners might find themselves thinking too much about Bejar's American counterpart, another seductive nerd about whom little is cartoonish: Stephen Malkmus. Both use a language-poetry approach to lyrics, both can bounce vocally from sexiness to whininess to sexy whininess to whiny sexiness, and both telegraph an inability to commit to either playing the role of artist or entertainer (bringing to mind a mantra from a David Berman poem: "anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship"). Malkmus used to act bummed when people would "whooo" his solos or the opening of "Grounded", and Bejar often denies his audiences the cathartic "fucking maniac" line from "European Oils". The central tension of both songwriters' really-early work results from the lengths to which they'd go to try to bury their popcraft like a treasure they didn't want anyone to find without making enough effort.
