Destroyer in Spanish

So, happy Christmas, merry holidays, ho ho ho and all that. After some weather-related drama, my son is home for the break, and he is not feeling especially good (bad cold, which I believe he's been putting off until he had time to have it, and now he does), but it is still very sweet to have him in the house again.

I have been pretty delinquent about this blog lately, I know...the new dusted tumblr has been hoovering up my spare time, and, also the holiday thing is a bit consuming...but I do have a couple of things to report on.

First my review of Destroyer's brief, very enjoyable Five Spanish Songs is up now at Blurt.


DESTROYER — Five Spanish Songs
Merge By JENNIFER KELLY

On Five Spanish Songs, Daniel Bejar pulls off the rare trick of covering five songs by a single author – the Spaniard Antonio Luque, who records as Sr. Chinarro – while sounding precisely like Daniel Bejar.

That’s a feat for any performer, but more so for Bejar, who is, by nature, slippery and hard to define. He is a midi-mastering solo symphonist one minute (Your Blues), a full-band rocker the next (Destroyer’s Rubies), and most recently a lite-fm Gerry Rafferty devotee (Kaputt, which is a good name for it). The main connector, for me, has always been his skill as a writer. His words have a sinuous-ness that glide effortlessly until they land in a tangle, dense, elegant, impacted with inference. He’s just too good at the oblique image, the tossed off bon mot, the line-drawn portraits of strangers in a crowd to be considered apart from the words. The music just wraps around them.

More




Also my review of the much more difficult, less accessible (but still interesting) Rene Hell album Vanilla Call Option is up now at the Dusted Tumblr. I picked this off the old Dusted dropbox by closing my eyes and clicking on it (I got three albums this way), and then when Otis was asking for reviews last fall, offered to review it. I have an extremely inadequate background for this sort of thing, so bear with me.

I said, "Jeff Witscher, in his latest effort as Rene Hell, has pushed beyond rhythm, melody and motif into pure abstracted sound. Squeaks, squibbles, odd itches, burbles and scratches are floodlit with blinding clarity, set like museum pieces against backgrounds of bright, disturbing silence. If “Smile Models” sounds, from certain angles, like an unoiled door swinging open and shut, it is the dream of a dream of a dream of that door. It squeaks without real friction, heat or physical presence."

There's more here.

Here is a sample of his stuff


I am just going to assume that this is the one and only blog post ever to feature both Destroyer and Rene Hell until someone shows me another one.

Daniel Bejar habla espanol

Remember when everyone thought Destroyer was a flash-in-the-pan New Pornographers offshoot that sounded way too much like David Bowie. Yeah, me, too, just barely...I think I was driving to Boston to interview Mr. Airplane Man the first time I heard Destroyer and I thought, "Okay, but I've already got Hunky Dory, what do I need this for?"

It was a long time ago. I came around for Your Blues and more or less stayed there. I was excited to get a new Destroyer EP, even if it is all in a foreign language. (On some level, all Destroyer songs are in a foreign language, aren't they? I mean, sort of like English, but not?) And I really like Five Spanish Songs, possibly all the more because I don't know what it's about. (Although this, as I alluded to earlier, is not really a big change from previous Destroyer albums.)

The EP is out November 26th, which seems like a long time away, but once you get into picking your Halloween costume and buying a big turkey and spending money for Christmas that you don't have, it'll go like lightning. Meanwhile, Pitchfork and Merge have entered into an unholy alliance to confuse everyone by leading with the only "rock" track on the disc. If you like this track, well, I have no idea if you'll like the rest of the EP because it is completely different. (Softer, more acoustic and probably more literate, since I'm catching a reference to Franz Kafka, but who knows really?)

This one, on the other hand, sounds kinda like "My Woman from Tokyo."