Destroyer - Kaputt

Dan Bejar’s work outside of The New Pornographers has never made many ripples on this side of the pond. More’s the pity, as Destroyer – the loose conglomerate of musicians that take the whimsical Vancouverite as their guiding star – boasts a back catalogue that sits easily amongst the best indie of the last decade. With Kaputt, Bejar has solidified his dark horse reputation with a tribute to the synth pop-pushers of yesteryear that’s part slickly-produced love letter, part withering reappraisal, but which is never less than totally absorbing.

Kaputt is not littered with the sounds of the 70s and 80s – rather, they form its basic building blocks, with Bejar taking the tropes of the era (right down to the synth washes and sax licks half-remembered from some late-night repeat), and reforming them into something new and remarkable. Thus the spirit of the Pet Shop Boys hangs over ‘Savage Night At The Opera’, while the bland inoffensiveness of Kenny G-style sax is harnessed in service of Bejar’s weirdly compelling musings on US race relations in ‘Suicide Demo For Kara Walker’.

Elsewhere, the seen-it-all sleaze of an Altman or Cassavetes film hangs heavily; ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Downtown’ conjure amphetamine-enhanced eyes meeting across dimly-lit dancefloors, over which Bejar seems to wander with aloof detachment, gesturing towards the absurdity of it all with an elegantly raised eyebrow. It’s nostalgic, in a drippingly ironic, Donnie Darko sort of way. ‘Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME / all sound like a dream to me’ he cries on the title track, at once lamenting and passing wry comment on a vanished time, while indulging in some of the music industry-kicking for which he is noted.

Lose yourself in this meticulously crafted melange.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 406, 11th April 2011

Panda Bear - Tomboy

Back in 2007, Person Pitch – Panda Bear’s third solo record and big sloppy hug to the world – won accolades aplenty, while steering the band from which he was moonlighting (a little thing called Animal Collective) onto the sampler-laden trajectory that produced the exploding star highlight of 2009, Merriweather Post Pavilion. Panda Bear has a new album now. It’s called Tomboy. It’s very, very good.

Gone are the samples and random snippets that punctuated Person Pitch; the haphazard-collage-of-sonic-elements kind of approach is ditched, supplanted by lushly-rendered monolithic blocs of vividly shimmering texture. Similarly, the DJ and techno influences that riddled his previous album (particularly its sprawling centrepiece ‘Bros’) have been submerged within the pop structure that defined the songs of Merriweather Post Pavilion.

But Tomboy is certainly not Merriweather MK II; Panda Bear, AKA Noah Lennox, squeezes an extraordinary range of sounds out of his machinery, forsaking the samplers in favour of a simpler trick; playing his guitar through a synth module. ‘You Can Count On Me’, a message from father to newborn son, provides an intimately heartstring-tugging prelude, before the record is kicked off in earnest with the thundering anthem of ‘Tomboy’. A regal air is struck with the leisurely stroll along the promenade of ‘Last Night At The Jetty’, while a soft climax is reached with the wind chime-laden dirge ‘Scheherazade’, in which Lennox’ tendency towards minimalism reaches its apex with gently lulling style.

Panda Bear has achieved a kind of sonic perfection on this record. The oft-made comparison to Brian Wilson has never seemed more apt, with his opulent sound achieved through an apparent compulsion to create Phil Spector-ish levels of production flawlessness.  While it is possible to overdose on overwhelmingly euphoric, vibrant sound, Lennox dares you to try.


The folks over at NPR are being good enough to stream Tomboy in its entirety for your listening pleasure.  Have at it!

First published as Album of the Week in The Brag, Iss. 405, April 4th 2011