Dan’S Boogie

Description

Dan's Boogie is a breakthrough album for Destroyer, both in the sense that it does things no Destroyer album has done before and also because, in order to make it, Dan Bejar had to breach a series of intentional and unintentional barriers. Contradictions are everywhere on Dan's Boogie, the haze around Dan illuminated by the friction between competing truths and tastes, such as when his interest in jazzy ballads collides with producer and bassist John Collins' interest in bands such as Led Zeppelin and Scritti Politti. On the title track, Dan embraced with an almost delirious joy the Rat Pack swagger in a dreamy soundscape made of soaring guitars, luxuriant brass, jazz drums, spaced-out synthesizers, and, perhaps most true to how Dan views himself, a clanky saloon piano. Sonically, the centerpiece of Dan's Boogie may be “Cataract Time,” an eight-minute epic that features some of the heaviest lyrics Dan has ever written, and one of Destroyer's most musically complex compositions. It is, to use Dan's phrasing, the kind of song you make when your back is against the wall, when it feels like the world is crashing down on you. And that's where the album's most radical change lies. Whereas previous Destroyer albums were at odds with the world, Dan's Boogie dances with it, its nine reveries blending into one long run.