Destroyer: Trouble In Dreams

With

a series of increasingly commanding albums, Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar has

been doing more than would seem could be done to salvage the concept of ennui. The theme could play out

in one of his songs: a semi-lionized, semi-laughable anachronism that gets

misused, pretentiously overregarded, laughed at for the wrong reasons, mistaken

for something less than serious. The condition could inspire glassy-eyed

stares, or an album-opening line like this: "Okay, fine, even the sky looks

like wine."

Trouble

In Dreams is

less immediately engaging than 2006's masterful Destroyer's Rubies, but Bejar's writing

remains improbably rich and stately, no matter how coy he plays in terms of

tunefulness. Over tangled indie-rock, with an angry/adenoidal yelp, Bejar

invokes lots of syndromes common to those stuck between skepticism and ideals;

they might be called "hipsters" in other contexts, but in Bejar's considered

world, they're artists, readers, thinkers, "music lovers." It's an important

crowd, but—as goes the refrain in "My Favorite Year"—"beware the

company you reside in."

Destroyer

sounds focused as a band this time out, but there's an uneasiness at play in

songs that tend to wander. "My Favorite Year" is rare as an unbridled

hit-in-waiting, with an epic sense of scale and guitars mixed big and with lots

of '80s reverb. Others tend to wince and withhold—but as Bejar sings in

another song that moans for eight slow minutes, "one gives what one gets."