from Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011:
02. Destroyer: Kaputt [Merge]
The cover of Destroyer's Kaputt finds Dan Bejar in front of the picturesque lookout point in Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Park. Walk a few steps away from that spot in the park, and you'll find another view with a charmingly meta bronze sculpture called "The Photo Session"in the middle of it. The 1984 piece is made up of four life-size people, one photographer and his three American-tourist subjects, and the idea is for actual sightseers to mingle with their metal counterparts, creating a peculiar mix of old and new, breathing and bronze. It turns the typical cheese-ball vacation photo into something weirder and self-reflexive.
That same uncanny effect goes gauzy all through Kaputt, which has Bejar soaking up some of his favorite high-fidelity records-- Roxy Music's Avalon, Steely Dan's Aja-- and filtering their reverbed, horn-spouting sounds through his own unique, free-associative consciousness. The languid music constantly flirts with bad taste stalwarts like lite jazz and soft rock and, in doing so, jumbles our own preconceptions. The result is disorienting-- and wholly pleasurable.
And it turns out these open-ended instrumentals are the perfect foil for Bejar, who abandons his characteristically stuffed and manic lyrical style for something more relaxed. Indeed, he recalled recording some of the album's vocals "while lying down on the couch." After 15 years, this is where Bejar stops worrying about being the cleverest indie rock writer around, which is OK because he's been doing this so long that the smarts simply flow out of his brain anyhow.
Kaputt is an album of mantras about uncomfortable truths made comforting by Bejar's impossibly casual delivery: He's been there, he's seen death and drugs and evaporated dreams, and he wouldn't trade in one spec. On what may be the record's most beatific-sounding hook, on "Song for America", he duets with guest singer Sibel Thrasher: "Winter, spring, summer, and fall/ Animals crawl toward death's embrace." It's a sing-along, Bejar-style. His understated humor is intact, but Kaputt is no joke. It would be far too easy for Bejar to simply poke fun at so many swishy synths, lounge-lizard inflections, and cruise-ship bass lines, but he does something much tougher here. He redeems them. --Ryan Dombal
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