Destroyer – Heaven, London, 28/06/11

I sort of presumed I would never see Destroyer. Dan Bejar resides, seemingly almost hermit-like, several thousand miles away, occasionally touring North America and apparently seldom crossing the Atlantic.

So for some months I listened to Destroyer’s Rubies on repeat, pretending that I was a Canadian artist; that I was part of the unfathomably cool slice of the intelligentsia to which he seemed to belong. It was the first record of his to which I came, and an album that I still think represents the lyrical high water mark of the first decade of the century.

Then Kaputt arrived, and people were suddenly interested. Bejar started appearing on late-night television. He developed a reputation for completing entire sets without taking his hand out of his pocket – for being ‘cool’ to the point of aloofness. And the comparative success that Kaputt has enjoyed meant it finally seemed certain that Destroyer would properly tour the UK.

In the event, that reputation was only partly justified. Granted, he spoke perhaps half a dozen times during the set. But, despite the proclamation that he “write poetry for myself”, there was a definite performative element here; the sense of a man carefully constructing an intricate prism through which he should be viewed. Resting a hand faux-camply on his half-height microphone stand, and sweeping aside his enviable hair at every possible opportunity, he careered like an oversized toddler around the line that separates the sit com vision of a West Coast artist, from the outer reaches of the autistic spectrum. The venue, just intimate enough to retain some of the smoky Latin Quarter atmosphere that I always associated with him, certainly helped.

In fact, Bejar’s persona has been confused even further with the release of Kaputt. If …Rubies was the sound of the self-conscious artist at work, of the rarefied upper echelons of a scene that prides itself on its intellectual credentials, then Kaputt is the sound of that artist not mellowed, not softened, but rounded. And nowhere was this more apparent than during a saxophone-heavy reworking of ‘Painter In Your Pocket’. This extraordinary song begins on record (although not live) with a lyric so incomparably perfect that it bears reprinting in its entirety: “And I’m reminded / Of the time that I was blinded by the sun / It was a welcome change / From the sight of you hanging like a willow / Off the arm of yet another visionary profitous East Van punk.” While the half-decade-old recording of the track is characterised by its clattering, deconstructed feel, tonight’s rendition is, at least musically, an almost flawless approximation of the music that your parents think was being made by hirsute double denim wearers in the mid 1980s, but which never actually existed; a music so perfectly considered, and so intensely musical, that you can barely accept its existence.

And this is the remarkable thing about Bejar today. While the Destroyer of the mid-2000s appeared to many too abstract, too esoteric to ever really connect, the Destroyer of 2011 has managed to develop a form and a content that are entirely at odds with one another. Yes, the sound is close to what one imagines the E Street Band might be doing, were they to have a slightly less bombastic songwriter. But the lyrics are as barbarous, as arrogant, as beautifully self-righteous as any one could imagine – and their force is compromised not one bit from the East Van punk-hating days. This disconnect between form and content, this new mismatch of artifice and substance, is what has made Bejar suddenly of interest to people who have as good as ignored him for more than a decade.

But that artifice simply would not be sustainable were it not for Bejar’s preternatural, once-in-a-generation talent. Tonight is evidence of a songwriter whose art was so fully formed when he began that he doesn’t have to abandon his juvenilia. He can revisit it, yes; tweak it, even. But the content – the impossibly wonderful lyrical content – remains intact. Bejar is almost old enough to be my father. I already knew he was the best lyricist working in English today. Tonight simply helped to illuminate the depths of his extraordinary gift.