Destroyer: Dan's Boogie Tour

What is a “boogie”? In the common tongue, it’s a dance or an occasion to dance, a song or a shindig, an incitement to move, quickly, whether it’s on the floor or out of town, getting down or lying low. This being a Destroyer album and not the common tongue, the implications of a title like Dan’s Boogie are at once more alluring and dangerous. “A boogie is a hustle, a scam that doesn’t quite work, the moves we make when we’re up against it,” explains Dan Bejar. “I think of spy work, double agents, sleeping with one eye open, an eye on the exits. But I also think of petty street-level victories and losses and improv.”

Dan’s Boogie is a breakthrough album for Destroyer, both in the sense that it makes moves that no Destroyer album to this point has made, and in the sense that, to record it, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional barriers to write the songs. Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the completion of LABYRINTHITIS turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar gave himself a New Year’s resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution—“Cataract Time,” “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” “Bologna,” and “Dan’s Boogie” among them—are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his collaborators have established for themselves: spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy. 

Lead single “Bologna” is the most radical frame for this energy, as it’s the first time Bejar wrote a song where he imagined himself as a supporting character. Taking lead is Fiver’s Simone Schmidt, whose voice—tough and expressive, piercing through the murk of the scene—is a siren’s call that haunts the album. The gravity of their voice pulls Dan’s Boogie into order around a sense of impending doom, the way a fatale’s promise of the unusual and the ecstatic dooms the principal character of an erotic thriller.  

“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” is a delicious bit of contradiction, a peppy song that came out of the havoc Bejar was intentionally wreaking on himself—its holiday cheeriness making the angst of its lyrics go down smoothly until the song veers off the road. “We are now entering a new phase,” Bejar intones, introducing layers of guitar and synthesizer that considerably darken the palette as he alternates between singing and speaking. The lyrics and vocals are improvised, invented as Bejar recorded the demo in his garage—a manic stream-of-consciousness and simultaneously exquisite display of his songwriting mastery.

Contradiction informs much of Dan’s Boogie, the fog swirling around Bejar illuminated by the friction between competing truths and tastes, as when his interest in jazzy ballads runs aground on producer and bassist John Collins’ interest in bands like Led Zeppelin and Scritti Politti. When Bejar told Collins that he was thinking of Sammy Davis Jr., the title track bloomed into being, Bejar adopting a Rat Pack swagger with almost delusional glee against a dreamy soundscape of soaring guitars, lush horns, jazz drumming, spaced-out synths, and, perhaps truest to how Bejar sees himself, plinking lounge piano.  

In terms of shaping sound, the centerpiece of Dan’s Boogie may be “Cataract Time,” an eight-minute epic that ranks as some of the heaviest lyrics Bejar has ever written, and one of Destroyer’s most musically intricate compositions. Borne aloft on an easygoing groove, Bejar’s lyrics—“a reckoning, a dressing down” as he describes them—are transfigured, their melancholy tasting almost counterintuitively like hope. It’s an intimate song that puts away Destroyer’s usual urban fable milieu in exchange for bracing interiority, but its lilting groove can see a future, one that Bejar and his band are eager to meet.

It is, to use Bejar’s phrase, the kind of song you make when you’re up against it, when it seems as if the world is crashing down upon you. And therein lies the album’s most radical shift: Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, Dan’s Boogie dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar’s eye may be on the exits, but he’s not leaving anytime soon.