I think I'm in the minority of Destroyer fans, in that I found much to be lacking in Your Blues; I've heard such overenthusiastic praise as to make even the word "exaggeration" lose all form, but essentially I see it as a failed experiment, although not for the reason that I believe usually gets cited. Bejar himself says (in an interview here) [answering the question of whether he thought Your Blues put some of his fans off] "Yeah. I mean, some people. I think the fans are used to being put off, at least the people that are into Destroyer, there are lots of them that didn't didn't [sic] like the last record. This might confuse them. They thought it was meandering or tuneless or like unnecessarily bombastic in places and rambling in others. I'm sure there are a lot of people who liked that record who think "Your Blues" is this half-baked exercise, and all of the synthetic sounds are completely hokey and completely sabotage the legitimacy of the songs. But there is no ironical take on synthetic sounds. We got the best sound box we could find."
So, Bejar sees his critics of accusing him of ironic distance, which seems like a silly claim to me, not for Bejar to claim, that is, but for his critics to do so. What I mean is that there is nothing on Your Blues that gives us a clue that it should be taken ironically, and just the presence of the midi sounds doesn't signal irony. If any of his critics have actually made this claim, and I'll be honest, I haven't really read around, I think they'd be hard-pressed to actually explain what that means, beyond a meek "Well, midi is supposed to be cheesy...right?" As we all know, just because something was once used in a certain way, that original way does not dictate how it is to be used in the future.
However, what I think is a far more damning criticism is that Your Blues fails, not because of some supposed irony or because people don't like the drama, but rather because Bejar himself has misjudged what actually makes for compelling drama in the music. As an experiment, it is certainly worth listening to, but as an interesting album in its own right, it fails quite spectacularly. This is what I mean:
There are many ways to create drama in music. The easiest is lyrically of course, from the overdrama of The Smiths to the melodrama of The Decemberists, to well, the kiddie drama of every critic's favorite punching bag, emo (because of course, every negative trait of the genre is embodied in every single instance of what can be called "emo"). But much more difficult to pull off is drama within the music, for here, what you are essentially doing is creating a kind of immediacy through only vocals and mood. There are good examples of this: Xiu Xiu and Frog Eyes both create a sense of drama through their vocals, that is, the way they sing has a certain force behind it that makes the listener believe that This Is Important. However, this kind of drama walks a fine line between being actually immediate and just being artificially immediate. What I mean is that the singer can trick you with his voice - by making it sound important, he fools you into believing that it actually is important. It's a manipulative kind of drama that the less-talented often traffic in and which even Jamie Stewart often slips into. Whereas Carey Mercer has a quality to his voice that creates drama, but not inauthentic drama.
And finally, there's the music itself, a certain theatricality about it that, once again in Frog Eyes case, works really well. But that is where Bejar makes his mistake. It is not the fact that he wants his music to be dramatic or to have flourishes, but rather that he just simply failed to create compelling drama. An orchestra may have indeed worked well, and even a midi orchestra could have worked, but the arrangements were boring, the tempos unchanging, and the force behind everything, this dramatic force, simply had no push to it, which left us with a rather bland album.
However, as a testament to just how good Bejar's songwriting is, all it took was a different context to let these songs shine. And it's unmistakable how great they are - since I grabbed this off a P2P a few weeks ago, I've listened to it once or twice a day every day, and I can't wait until I can go to the record shop to pick up a real copy. Furthermore, I think in working with Frog Eyes on these songs, he actually does what he failed to do on Your Blues; he really lets loose his voice on this, perhaps with Mercer's encouragement, and creates the drama sought on the previous album. When I hear "An Actor's Revenge", the idea about an actor wanting revenge on those who have fed him bad lines really has some kind of substance behind it. And while I may like the Your Blues version of "The Music Lovers" a little better, it's simply because I think Bejar's composed that song most in the style of his older ones (which makes sense since it was written three years previously). Each reinterpretation then is less a new instantiation of the song itself, but rather is more of a way of giving to the songs what was missing in the first place.
