Review Summary: Beauty through inscrutability
Destroyer, a Canadian indie rock band fronted by prolific musician Dan Bejar, adds to their considerable 12-album discography with LABYRINTHITIS (a word for an inner ear disorder, in case you were wondering). This album was my first exposure to Destroyer and is one of the albums that has taken me the longest to digest since I started writing reviews. I was immediately intrigued by the rich array of tones and musical textures on this album, but was also perplexed by the lyricism that often came across as non-sensical and incoherent. I felt like there was a deeper meaning I was missing and was determined to keep listening until I discovered it.
However, after reading through several interviews with Dan Bejar, I realized that the inscrutability of the messaging was by design. The vocals are less about delivering a concrete message, and more about adding to the overall mood of a track through the tone and the subconscious associations the listener makes with specific words or lines. The album demands that listeners not try to wrap their arms around its meaning, but instead let themselves dissolve into the music to experience it directly. Bejar alludes to this with the self-referential line, "You go over your story again and again / But it makes no sense, not the third or the fourth time." Once I shifted into that mindset, I was able to appreciate more of what this album had to offer.
The album's opener, "It's in Your Heart Now," demands this shift right from the beginning. It's a slowly developing and repetitive song that, at 7 minutes, many people would find difficult to engage with. However, once I stopped expecting the track to really go anywhere, I was able to appreciate the musical landscape that was being painted. The atmospheric guitars and synths slowly crescendo throughout the song, drawing to mind the quiet majesty of the sun rising over a hill in a pastoral landscape, shining light on the dewy foliage as Dan Bejar repeats the lines "It's in your heart now" and "You want to go home" throughout the song.Â*
My favorite track on the album—"Tintoretto, It's for You"—leans deeper into lyrical inscrutability to a much different effect. Dan Bejar comes across as an unhinged movie villain as he mutters eerie lines such as "Do you remember the mythic beast?" and "Now what do you call it when every part of the bird is used?" The tension builds until Bejar mutters the phrase "Tintoretto, it's for you" and unleashes the song's beast, a crashing and sinister synth riff that builds in intensity as the song moves goes on. Do I know what the song is about? Not at all, but I love the dark, mysterious, and ominous vibe that it creates.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm one to appreciate unconventional music just because it feels "artsy." A few songs on the album had musically interesting moments, but not enough of an emotional payoff for me to want to come back to them (e.g., "The States" and "Labyrinthitis"). I also found Bejar's voice to be a difficult barrier to get over at first with its thin, coarse, and not-particularly melodic quality. I'm still not a huge fan, but it became less of a barrier for me once I got used to it (after several listens).
Is this album for everyone? Not at all. If you're not used to Destroyer or this style of music, it may take more work to engage with it than you're willing to put in, and that's a perfectly reasonable response. For my part, the musical payoff was worth the journey and this is an album that I plan to return to in the future.
