Dan Bejar has just mangled a joke. “I’ve never tried speaking to an audience before,” he apologizes, and it’s not sarcasm: time was, a typical show involved Bejar drunkenly tripping over monitors, tossing off shambolic renditions of new songs and answering entreaties to get the fuck off the stage with lines like "I feel... somehow... that these comments... are directed... towards me." Tonight, however, the songwriter’s meta-indie-rock flagship Destroyer appears downright professional. The customary tweaking of his cultish fans is being done with affection rather than sheer capriciousness.
A plurality of songs came from Destroyer’s fine new album Trouble in Dreams, but Bejar’s backing band is the same one he assembled for 2002’s This Night, and the remainder of the set was mostly drawn from that record. It’s a noisy, sprawling outlier, and I couldn’t believe how loud the songs were at first — the killer bassline from “My Favourite Year” is beaten into an inaudible pulp by overpowering drums. Otherwise, though, the band generally bolsters Bejar’s new songs and keeps an eye on the shaggier This Night numbers. A lot of those songs sound like aimlessness threatening to coalesce, and tonight the jamming actually leads somewhere, such as the gloriously spastic freakout that ends “Hey, Snow White.”
Still, the engine of Destroyer is Bejar’s voice. It’s often caricatured as yet another indie-rock yelp, and Bejar occasionally leans on loud bleating tonight in lieu of the subtler vocal techniques he uses so well. But his cryptically poetic lyrics wouldn’t be half as fascinating without his genius for phrasing, that elastic cadence, and he does show it off: twisting a line from “The State” about his baby’s tree into a sing-song tease; suddenly torquing a mundane register towards bellowing cacophony; frolicking across what sounds like a satire of Beach Boys melodies with demented falsetto harmonies.
Sure, he’ll still randomly turn his back to the audience or reveal less-than-monkish devotion to practicing his songs, but that’s part of the newly winning charm. At one point, gingerly approaching the unhinged chorus from “My Favourite Year,” a halting Bejar stammers “beware… b-beware…” The crowd screams; he grins and reciprocates: “Beware the company you reside in!” Near the end we hear him sing “it’s not your night.” Now he’s being ironic.