Destroyer Tear It Up at Paradise Rock Club
Lucca Swain ‘26 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
No one does it quite like Dan Bejar. Sauntering out on stage Friday night at Paradise Rock Club for a show at the midway point of the “Dan’s Boogie” tour, the frizzy-haired, perpetually bearded singer-songwriter behind Destroyer sported his signature dishevelment — a look the Canadian artist has staunchly maintained over the last twenty-five years.
Joining Bejar on stage were no less than six other musicians, comprising the drums, bass, keys, trumpet, and two guitars. The band adjusted and plugged in and tuned as normal, though what stood out immediately was the fact that Bejar’s micstand was raised up only to his knee’s, low enough that he had to stoop down to grab his mic. Whether this was an intentional choice or a technical limitation I could not say, though if it is the former, there is no other artist who it would be more in character for than Bejar, who has spent seemingly his entire career attempting to defy appearances by any means necessary. His lyrics have never stopped cynically poking fun at any and all who might try to deride his work:
“The world woke up to proclaim/ “Thou shall not take part in, or make bad art,” he sings on “The Bad Arts,” off of 2001’s Streethawk: A Seduction.
Even the way in which Destroyer’s sound has restlessly hopped stylistically, from Bowie-esque glam rock to indie rock to jewel-studded sophisti-pop, is emblematic of a desire to avoid being constrained, to never give onlookers the freedom to pigeonhole Destroyer into being anything but what it is in the moment.
What I’m trying to say is that Dan Bejar is a fascinating character, so much so that I had a hard time imagining what this concert was going to be like. When you spend enough time listening to someone’s music, their thoughts, their projection of themselves into the great complex consciousness that is music, you start to form ideas about the work in your head. What the artist believes, what the music means, and your relationship to that music (and everything it represents) becomes as innate to the music as the music itself. It becomes impossible to believe that the voice singing the song is anything more than just a voice; the human component abstracts, and the sound supersedes its creator.
As a writer, I would have a hard time translating my years of love for this music into a legible article without sounding like a total nerd. And as a fan, it got to the point where I could barely imagine Dan Bejar being real, almost as if I would go to this concert and nobody would ever walk out on that stage and I would suddenly realize that I had been deluding myself the whole time.
So imagine my surprise when, on Friday night, Dan Bejar and his entourage did in fact walk out onto the stage, in the flesh, and without a word blast off into the stratosphere with “The Same Thing as Nothing at All,” with all of the bravado and reverb-soaked audial majesty of the recordings I had been listening to for so long. The aforementioned song comes from Dan’s Boogie, the band’s magnificent latest record released earlier this year, so to say I was as familiar with “The Same Thing as Nothing at All” as I am with the rest of Destroyer’s catalog would be a lie. Still, I would also be lying if I told you that it didn’t immediately become one of my favorite recent Destroyer tracks after seeing it live.
Despite the band’s relatively unassuming setup, the sound of the show was unbelievable, a veritable audio freight train that at the same time captured immaculately the lushness and atmosphere so intrinsic to Destroyer’s music. The already irresistible hooks and climaxes of every song were now blessed with the blissful, fuzzed-out euphoria of shoegaze, the iconic highs of the band’s best songs escalating into manic jam sessions between the musicians of the band who were – unsurprisingly – fantastic. Longtime Destroyer drummer Joshua Wells was the band’s thumping heart, though it was undoubtedly the celestial wailing of trumpeter JP Carter – which he manipulated using a sound board to give his instrument a massive, enveloping quality – that brought the band’s sound to the next level.
In an hour and a quarter-long set encompassing both Dan’s Boogie and beloved tracks from across the band’s catalog, it’s unsurprising to say that the main focus of the show was Dan Bejar himself. As a frontman, he is certainly idiosyncratic, his languid vocal style somewhere between singing and slam poetry, while his words are closer to prose, an eclectic mishmash of perspectives, characters, scenes, references, and just about anything he can dream up and work into his painterly lyrical concoctions. To an unfamiliar listener, Bejar’s lyrical style could come off as aggravating after long enough; he name drops people, places, ideas in non sequiturs, crafts metaphors that cohere only in expressionistic ways, but has the tone and words-per-minute of an intellectual. It’s a vivid, colorful style that requires some wrapping your brain around.
Live, Bejar’s unique style of performance takes on an entirely new quality, due in part to how much his energy ebbs and flows with that of his band. On a song like the all-time great “European Oils,” his animated declaration of, “She needs to feel at ease with her father/ The fucking maniac!” was at once mirrored by the audience, who shouted the line in tandem. .. At other times, there was a noticeable contrast in energy between Bejar and the band, such as on “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood,” where the song’s ultra catchy, super suave chorus slowly ascended into a jam sesh which seemed to almost engulf Bejar whole, his laid-back admissions of “the dreamer” lost in the tsunami of sonic power generated by the musicians. .
Maybe the most fun part of listening to Destroyer, at least from Kaputt onwards (and maybe sometimes Streethawk), is how slyly rhythmic the songwriting manages to be, on slick songs like “Chinatown” or “Kaputt” that move so lackadaisically and with so much swagger, you almost can’t help bobbing your head to them. . In person, the seemingly simple construction of a song like “Times Square” takes on a whole new dimension; Destroyer’s laser-precise rhythm section – a combo of fretless bass and airtight drumming – got to apply their chops to an already groovy song, while the players around them went ham, playing as if they intended fill the entire concert venue to the brim with music.
But even more than the technicality of the playing on display, there was a consummate professionalism to the entire affair which only made it all the more impressive. . This became apparent towards the middle of the set, while the band settled into the ice-cold “Bologna,” and Bejar brought opener Jennifer Castle back out to duet with him on the track. In stark contrast to the impressionistic third-person ramblings of Bejar, Castle’s lyrical style is specific, immediate, personal, her piercing vibrato the polar opposite of Bejar’s impassive murmur. But nonetheless, the two singers came together as naturally as peanut butter and jelly, their dual charisma effortlessly melding into the cool noirish fantasy of “Bologna,” like two disparate worlds merging back together into something opaque and beautiful.
Though as hard as Destroyer went song-for-song, there were just as many amusing little things in between. When he wasn’t singing, Bejar was crouched down on the floor by his mic stand, where carefully surveilled the audience while sipping from a green plastic cup. Or there’s the ending of “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” where Bejar’s ramblings reached their logical conclusion, becoming so long-winded that the frontman had to pull out a lyrics sheet, which he read off with such intensity and vigor that it induced whiplash:
“I burned my boats/ I’m staying here in the harbor,” he yelled impassionately.
But the undeniable highlight of the night was “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” which came as a surprise, especially considering the blissful two-and-a-half minute ambient piece which normally prefaces the song was replaced by a lengthy trumpet/noise experiment. The moment was led by trumpeter JP Carter, who blew his entire soul into the instrument while at the same time twiddling with the many knobs on his sound board, creating something more skin to the noise experiments of Merzbow more thananything approximating a Destroyer song. But when the transition into the song itself hit, it was smooth as butter, that first utterance of “Brown paper bag/ Don’t stop me now, I’m on a roll” like a golden ray of sunshine warming your face after a dour thunderstorm.
It was a joyous night, every single song an effervescent little miracle that heated the soul and got feet moving. I can’t say I understand Dan Bejar or Destroyer any better than I did before I came in, but that’s probably for the better. And that wasn’t a concern in the moment, because when the band closed their encore with a swinging performance of “Streethawk l,” all I could catch myself thinking was, “Damn, I wish they did “Rubies”, too.