Destroyer: This Night

Five albums into its career, Destroyer may still be best known as "the other project" for Daniel Bejar, a bright singer-songwriter who co-founded the ferocious Canadian power-pop supergroup The New Pornographers and provided some of the best songs on its stellar album Mass Romantic. Destroyer's relative obscurity may change with the release of This Night, the band's first album for prestige indie label Merge Records, and the best showcase yet for Bejar's loose, David Bowie-inflected space-pop. This Night opens with a tinkle of piano, a rattle of drums, the odd bit of synthesizer, and idly picked guitar and bass, over which Bejar declaims nasally. The song ("This Night") sprawls across six minutes, sometimes spiking, sometimes crashing. Destroyer follows that form throughout the record, setting off on lengthy explorations that remain fairly tuneless until Bejar lands on an appealing guitar riff, or begins repeating a line in a sing-songy voice, approximating a chorus. The organic approach lends scope and drama, and when Destroyer pulls it together for a song with more delights than it usually manages, the glittery, big-sky tone and clear sense of direction generates an almost cosmic sensation. This Night doesn't always coalesce so beautifully, and the length of the album combined with the frequent formlessness of individual tracks leads to some tedium, but the sudden, singular moments of nearly mystical lyricism reward patience. The record is almost an exercise in the power of potential energy.