Destroyer
Destroyer's Rubies
on Merge RecordsA

Forget The New Pornographers' combing of the power-pop tradition; Dan Bejar, "the other guy" from that Vancouver super-group, has waded in its underbelly for a decade now. Where the former revels in Beach Boys sunshine and soaring Big Star harmonics, Destroyer, Bejar's primary occupation, mines with abandon pop's oft-forgotten corridors. His reference points speak to this: Hall and Oates-style yacht rock, glam rock during its idiosyncratic younger years, Bob Dylan's stream-of-consciousness street poetry following his electric heyday. Bejar is as self-referential as he is embracing of those heroes, ostensibly straddling the line between post-modernist and rock classicist like no contemporary indie rocker.

But it'd be unfairly simplistic to call Destroyer's Rubies, the band's seventh album, a mere hybrid of David Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Dylan's New Morning. Even so, Bejar's songcraft--a self-described "European blues" riddled with tongue-in-cheek curses clashed against literary ramblings, seamlessly inserted lyrics from a host of influences, and allusions to his own carefully-wrought mythology--simply begs to be deconstructed. It should be obvious, then, that the 10-song disc is a career highlight; Rubies is a treasure chest, distilling Destroyer's finest moments into perhaps the best expression of its sound to date.

That sound should be fairly familiar. "Your Blood" shimmies with a lazy, bohemian swagger, as though someone replaced "Like a Rolling Stone's" honky-tonk with Mick Ronson guitars and winks at Albert Camus, all while the typically nasal Bejar sings hypnotically, but largely without cadence. "A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point" plays similar games, referencing the Gospel of Luke only moments before lifting a line from Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately."

With allusions to the Smiths, R.E.M., Ezra Pound and countless others, Rubies is as much a musicologist's delight as it is an English major's. But the best lyrics are Bejar's own: In "Looter's Follies," he begs, "Why can't you see that a life in arts and a life of mimicry is the same thing?"

Rubies drives that very point home; even Bejar's notorious iconoclasm is illusory. In Bejar's world, rock 'n' roll is an open source and he understands that the genre has always profited more from idolatry than innovation. The band's name has always confounded listeners, but never before Rubies has its meaning been so abundantly clear: If rock 'n' roll is to survive, its disciples must never revere, only destroy.

-Jonathan Fischer