With
a series of increasingly commanding albums, Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar has
been doing more than would seem could be done to salvage the concept of ennui. The theme could play out
in one of his songs: a semi-lionized, semi-laughable anachronism that gets
misused, pretentiously overregarded, laughed at for the wrong reasons, mistaken
for something less than serious. The condition could inspire glassy-eyed
stares, or an album-opening line like this: "Okay, fine, even the sky looks
like wine."
Trouble
In Dreams is
less immediately engaging than 2006's masterful Destroyer's Rubies, but Bejar's writing
remains improbably rich and stately, no matter how coy he plays in terms of
tunefulness. Over tangled indie-rock, with an angry/adenoidal yelp, Bejar
invokes lots of syndromes common to those stuck between skepticism and ideals;
they might be called "hipsters" in other contexts, but in Bejar's considered
world, they're artists, readers, thinkers, "music lovers." It's an important
crowd, but—as goes the refrain in "My Favorite Year"—"beware the
company you reside in."
Destroyer
sounds focused as a band this time out, but there's an uneasiness at play in
songs that tend to wander. "My Favorite Year" is rare as an unbridled
hit-in-waiting, with an epic sense of scale and guitars mixed big and with lots
of '80s reverb. Others tend to wince and withhold—but as Bejar sings in
another song that moans for eight slow minutes, "one gives what one gets."