Dizzy spells
The wonderful and frightening world of Dan Bejar continues its expansion. By Victoria Segal.
“YOU HAVE to look at it from all angles/Says the cubist judge from cubist jail,” sings Dan Bejar on June, one of the tightly encrypted songs on his thirteenth Destroyer LP. It’s a line that could stand as a mission statement for the pleasing disorientations of Labyrinthitis (named after a vertigo-inducing inner-ear disorder) as much as Bejar’s entire career. Synth-pop flâneur; torch-song hipster; lo-fi poet: Bejar has rarely lacked arresting perspectives, a different angle.
While Labyrinthitis still echoes 2011 breakthrough Kaputt in its love of New Order, The Cure and Associates, these songs come mined with surprises. “An explosion is worth a hundred million words,” he sings on faintly satirical folk coda The Last Song, “and that is maybe too many words to say.” Here, it feels the hyperliterate Bejar is trying to up the explosions – these songs feel a little more reckless, their compounds more volatile. June busts out in Close (To The Edit) playfulness, LCD Soundsystem at the creative writing retreat; The States sounds like Momus covering Into The Groove before radiating out into ambient trance.
Bejar’s lyrics often suggest he’s zeroing in on a great truth, an epiphany so bright and terrible it must be described in sideways language, never approached head on. Dread seeps through everything. Suffer mentions poisonings and “a drowning in the Trevi Fountain” while Nick Cave hellscape Tintoretto, It’s For You, sounds like a Faustian pact being cashed in: “The ceiling’s on fire and the contract is binding”. Eat The Wine, Drink The Bread again suggests artistic vanity and compromise in the face of doom: “I piss on the floor/The band sets up on the floor,” sings Bejar over oddly inappropriate disco. Even a beagle’s bark (“ruff ruff”) is open to interpretation.
There are gentler moments – the title track’s chirruping instrumental, It’s In Your Heart Now’s unforced New Order euphoria – but at times, Bejar’s urgent allusions turn
Labyrinthitis into a problem to be solved, a musical Rubik’s cube to twist into line. Does Tintoretto, It’s For You evoke electroclash as a comment on cycles of hype and obsolescence? Does June’s “strike for more pay” nod to The Fall’s C’N’C-S Mithering? Given this is a man who obscurely named 2017’s Ken after Suede’s working title for
The Wild Ones, it’s not impossible – but before you know it, you’ve got red string and newspaper cuttings pinned all over the walls, tracking meaning like a TV detective hunting a serial killer.
In its way, it’s an admirable MO.
Labyrinthitis is another tantalising Destroyer album, one that resists being clutched too tight or loved too hard as it roams its peculiar world. For those prepared to follow Bejar’s philosophical loops and cosmic hunches, however, it can spin you round, a record always on the side of the angles.