Destroyer Coming to Neptune Theatre on February 8th
Acclaimed indie rock outfit Destroyer will be coming to the Neptune Theatre on February 8th, 2018.
Destroyer’s previous full-length saw Dan Bejar alluding to David Sylvian, New Order, ’80s Miles Davis, Roxy Music’s Avalon, and Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls; constructing lyrics from cue cards sent to him by African-American visual artist Kara Walker; and eulogizing the pallid ghosts of the UK music press (“Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME / All sound like a dream to me”). Said album, Kaputt, proved to be both a Billboard chart commercial breakthrough and universally garlanded critical touchstone, ascending to second place on Pitchfork’s Best of 2011 list (actually topping it would have been gauche).
By contrast, Poison Season opens with the Vancouver native swathed in Hunky Dory strings. He’s a dashboard Bowie surveying four wracked characters–Jesus, Jacob, Judy, Jack–simultaneously Biblical and musical theatre. This bittersweet, Times Square-set fanfare is reprised twice more on the record–first as swaying, saxophone-stoked “street-rock” and then finally as a curtain-closing reverie.
“The first and last songs are actually one song tracked live with quintet,” explains their author. “I even sang with the band. That song always swung between super austere and super mid-’70s Springsteen/Bowie street-rock. In the end, I decided I wanted both. Couldn’t really figure out a way to sequence the orchestral version within the record, so I decided to carve it up as a book-ending motif, with the rock version squarely in the middle.”
Broadway Danny Bejar dramatically switches scenes with “Dream Lover,” all Style Council strut and brassy, radio-ready bombast (echoes of The Boo Radleys’ evergreen earworm “Wake Up Boo!”). This being Destroyer, its paramours-on-the-run exuberance is judiciously spiked by his deadpan delivery: “Oh shit, here comes the sun.”
Tickets to the show and more information can be found here.