Destroyer. (Photo courtesy Merge Records.)
Written by DCist contributor Andy Hess
Dan Bejar, the front-man of Vancouver’s Destroyer, does a lot of things I hate to see at live shows. He barely addresses the audience. He has a tendency to play with his backed turned toward the crowd. He doesn’t look like he actually wants to be in the room, acting as if he’s just there to sing and then go on his way. If you’ve seen him perform with The New Pornographers, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. With the power-pop supergroup, he usually wanders in from off stage to perform when he’s needed for a song or two then goes and hides in the shadows.
Despite all that, Bejar’s performance at the Black Cat on Tuesday night was not phoned in by any stretch. It was just a matter of getting used to how the idiosyncratic songwriter operates live. On the albums, Bejar’s very much a theatrical character; but live, he is a stoic, silent leader. But Destroyer isn’t a moniker that is often mistaken for a solo artist like Sam Beam with Iron & Wine — in fact, they are a tight band and the music did much of the talking for Bejar.
The set list relied heavily on the band’s latest record Kaputt, including all but two songs from the January release (“Poor In Love” and “Savage Night At The Opera” were the exclusions), while cherry picking from the band’s last three albums, Trouble In Dreams, Your Blues and Destroyer’s Rubies. The songs from Kaputt are sprawling, horn-drenched, slow burners. In a live setting, these songs are punchier, more forceful, and give each individual member of the band the chance to shine out from behind the record’s slick production. Multiple times throughout the night, both horn players received rapturous applause mid-song for their performances on “Suicide Demo For Kara Walker” and “Blue Eyes”. The brass-laden versions of older songs “My Favorite Year” and “Painter In Your Pocket” — typically guitar driven numbers — showed the band’s confidence and sincerity in its approach to the late ’70s, new age sound.
The songs worked well, as the do on the album, because of that sincerity. There are no winks or nods hinting at the irony in recording an album of songs that could be classified as easy listening; on the contrary, Destroyer made the much-maligned genre sound revolutionary.
