Destroyer - This Night
(Merge)
Although the roots of modern experimental writing go back centuries (some techniques of the OULIPO, a French group dedicated to "potential literature", dating back to even Greek times), it has only been in the last hundred years, since modernism took root, one may suppose, that really interesting things have been going on in literature, en masse. Of course, this is a modern egocentric view, so no offense should be taken by the various Shakespeare scholars and lovers of Dickens, but a major paradigm shift has occurred in the written world which has centered mainly on the meaning of the texts.
On one side of the divide stands the classical novel, definite in meaning, clear plot, understandable progression, Freitag's diagram of a plot and such. Roland Barthes's neologism for this was the Readerly (or lisible as his coined word goes) novel, one that is authorial in exegesis, leaving the reader as a passive slate on which to sketch ideas. Opposing this, is the Writerly (or scriptable, as it goes) text. This is the form that modern experimental writing takes, indefinite as an unobserved particle, formless in meaning, and only having significance if the reader so invents it.
The same criteria can be held to lyrics too. Readerly lyrics being those that tell a story, "I remember a summer's day/I remember walking up to you/I remember my face turned red/And I remember staring at my feet/I remember before we met/I remember sitting next to you/And I remember pretending I wasn't looking" (Yo La Tengo's "Our Way to Fall")—these make up most, if not all, mainstream music, and a good deal of independent music, and of course writerly lyrics, which make up an all-too-small section of independent music, the most famous and extreme examples being Pavement, Guided by Voices, The Fall, US Maple, Gastr Del Sol, and so on, but probably one of the most deserving and lesser recognized is Destroyer.
Destroyer's fifth album entitled This Night is probably one of Dan Bejar's most accomplished in his career so far. Mature in the way The Silver Jews latest is "mature"—that is, ineffably adult, perhaps it's the crisp production, the mainly electric instruments, the '70s sound—there's definitely an air of adulthood that wafts from this album, although it's somewhat difficult to pin down exactly why. The song structures are still somewhat basic—nothing too radical, Bejar's voice sounds no different—still very early-Bowie, the only change perhaps being the instrumentation... and even that fails to capture it. A mystery, really.
Of course the real prize is Bejar's lyrics, being some of the most interesting and indecipherable I've had the pleasure reading. Mellifluous and also esoteric, they help push the boundaries of pop song lyricism "The Relevant Ballads are calling you 'truant' and then 'untrue'/The Annotated Swan Song says/'You've been here too long with your ashes by the river/There is something you were supposed to give her real soon'" or "So you stole that Schwinn and rode right in to the Winner's Circle of the Sun/Now Mile-End is claiming—'You're one of those! Take off those clothes. You're one of them!'" The combination of 70s-esque music with interpretation-defying lyrics makes This Night a thoroughly enjoyable, and intellectually stimulating album at the same time.
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