Dan Bejar's intellect is so formidable it feels like an event, and Destroyer has, for 12 years or so, been indie rock's most rewarding intellectual project. You listen to Destroyer to hear the smartest person at a party mutter funny and erudite things in your ear. Even by 2006, Bejar had generated a world deep and manifold enough that fans of his made, and passed around, a Dan Bejar lyric generator. His mind, and the music he's made exploring its contours, is a minor zip code in independent rock music.
Kaputt from 2011 exposed that zip code a little bit, briefly subjecting Bejar to the indignities of mid-level festival-touring success. It was the most immediately beautiful record he'd ever made, but it also accidentally coincided with a rising interest in the soft rock of the 1970s and '80s, which meant that Bejar, long the wry bridge troll beneath the zeitgeist, momentarily represented it. The story is important to Bejar's career, but it feels like an ancillary concern to Poison Season, his new album. The point and pleasure of Destroyer's world, after all, is that it motors away on its own juice, irrespective of others. The world is a big place, his records seem to say, and it can be wearying and demanding, but your thoughts are a republic entirely within your control. As he memorably put it on *Destroyer's *Rubies' "Painter in Your Pocket": "You looked OK with the others, you looked great on your own."
Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. There are string arrangements all over Poison Season, and they are gorgeously recorded: the orchestra on "Girl in a Sling" sounds like 180-gram vinyl even while in earbuds. Destroyer has always partly been a nostalgia project, even when Bejar's nostalgia was decidedly ersatz—his records aim to stir the feelings that classic recordings arouse in us. Streethawk hearkened back to glam-rock Bowie even if the resemblance was off, and the magic of Kaputt was partly that of a peculiar and gnomic figure like Bejar conjuring the jaded romanticism of Bryan Ferry. On Poison Season, he visits a different section of his record collection, one that predates rock'n'roll, and he applies all the studied love and imagination to the endeavor we've come to expect from him.
Bejar uses his voice in new ways here, stretching words out generously on the two-part story-song "Bangkok" so that we feel the beauty of the melody but also don't miss the bumps and crags in his throat. There's a basic tenderness that communicates itself beneath the vermouth of his words, and they remain a joy to soak in, a purposeful blurring of sense and sound. Lines like "The writing on the wall/ Wasn't writing at all" or "It sucks when there's nothing but gold in those hills" resist interpretation and invite savoring—the Destroyer-lyric-generator couplet here would probably be "The ass king's made of asses, the ice queen's made of snow," from "Archer on the Beach". But my favorite moment might be Bejar muttering "aw shit, here comes the sun" on "Dream Lover", the Bruce Springsteen-style rocker that, as he told Pitchfork, he didn't even want to make. The juxtaposition—a curmudgeon swearing under his breath as the horns and drums he's arranged around him power the record up to transcendence—is, as he Bejar noted with some self-deprecation in that same interview, "Destroyer 101."
In fact, there are moments on Poison Season where Bejar's formidable mind threatens to drag the proceedings down a bit. The swooning '50s strings sometimes collides awkwardly with the '70s pop gestures—the funk bass line that peppers "Midnight Meet the Rain" mostly serves to underline the sleepiness of the album's last third. "Hell" lurches between ponderous chamber pop and a swinging beat, capturing the album's uncertainty about exactly what kind of dance it's doing. For an album that took an unusual amount of time for Bejar to make—the four years separating Poison Season from Kaputt represents his longest stretch ever—it feels tonally hesitant, jets of cold water and warmth doled out in furtive and uncontrolled doses. He has never made, and will probably never make, a bad album—he's far too accomplished, intuitive, and literate for that. But on Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.
