“It Takes A Thief:” Brief Reflections on Destroyer’s Extraordinary New LP Labrynthitis
By 
Two decades after his toy shop-Bowie breakthrough Streethawk: A Seduction, Dan Bejar remains as protean, ambitious and gloriously distracted as his foundational hero. Over the course of the last twenty years he has released LPs as fully realized as 2011’s universally acclaimed Kaputt and as aesthetically disjunctive as 2004’s Yer Blues, becoming in the process one of the best and most unexpected success stories of what has by and large been a poisonous season for the music industry. On his new LP LABYRINTHITIS Bejar seems in a reflective mood, which is far different from saying he’s in a quiet one. The New Order-meets-Rat Pack opener “It’s In Your Heart Now” summons nostalgia for a past that never was before devolving into a disquieting squall. The skittering “Suffer” sounds like early Big Audio Dynamite, a heady mix of sequenced drums, fluttering synths and stately guitar figures set to an ominously Old Testament adjacent sentiment: “Don’t matter where/ Don’t matter when/ You’re going to suffer.” And so it goes, through ten tense and frequently beautiful meditations on romantic loss and spiritual ecstasy all processed through Bejar’s ever more refined Leonard Cohen-fronting-Roxy Music sound machine. With his digressive, fast moving, old world mind and singular vision Bejar is a genre of one, but the shadows of others loom everywhere. Whether or not closing track The Last Song is or isn’t an elegy to his late friend David Berman, it meaningfully connects the two great songwriters with its profoundly compassionate ten thousand mile stare into the abyss. They are translators of the past and oracles of the present, links to shared history and humanity. A fleeting tether to sanity as we perform, day after day, the very modern dance.
You get up, you stand up
You pull your head on out of nooses
You don’t know what the use is
On any given day
You fake say “hello”
And you fake say “goodbye”
You tilt your head up towards the sky and say, “Oh wow, look at the sun.”– The Last Song