Destroyer is magnetic and sublime on Dan's Boogie

Graceful rhythms swirl and rattle behind a wall of hazy synthetic string arrangements before melancholic discordance sets in, extracting warped beauty from the abyss. This curious juxtaposition lies at the heart of Dan’s Boogie, the Canadian songwriter’s magnetic and sublime fourteenth effort. In many ways, it’s very much quintessential grade Destroyer; full of dream-like soundscapes, Bejar’s fractured, impenetrable poetry and reliably thrilling flirtations with the avant-garde. This might be best encapsulated by the exhilarating “Sun Meet Snow” which sways between moments of gentle serenity and maddening, distorted chaos.

Dan’s Boogie begins though with the aforementioned widescreen majesty of “The Same Thing As Nothing At All” and while it serves as a perfect introduction, the record is littered with innumerable highlights. In an interview with Pitchfork conducted almost a decade ago, Bejar made the rather telling confession that if he makes pop music it’s by mistake and seemed particularly irked with the hypothetical notion of his audience humming along to Destroyer songs. So it’s perhaps ironic that single “Hydroplaning Off The Edge Of The World” contains one of his most memorable melodic hooks to date. “The Ignoramus Of Love” is even better, itself a gorgeous referral back to the pleasing 70s tones of Poison Season.

The penultimate track “Cataract Time” is a piece of such obvious, opulent brilliance that it feels almost redundant to even mention it at all. Although relatively simple in terms of structure, a series of arpeggios build and soon envelop the listener into its blissful groove. It’s not an exaggeration to say that despite running at eight minutes in duration, you would gratefully accept proceedings to continue on loop for an untold amount of time. “Carve yourself out of illusion / You take the long way round / A setting sun” Bejar sings as the sound of saxophones fade into a delicate mist.

There’s a leanness present here which tends to evade most Destroyer records, and clocking in at just under 37 minutes, only Bejar’s 1996 debut We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge is shorter. Complex yet surprisingly accessible, Dan’s Boogie doesn’t necessarily break a huge amount of new ground. It does however, see Bejar successfully refining his craft even further with superb results, thirty years into a quite remarkable career.