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Destroyer isn’t a band people review it’s a band about which elitist critics and fanatic music obsessives write theses and treatises. That’s exactly how Dan Bejar likes it the New Pornographers’ elusive beardo revels in penning twisted multivalent tunes that take 20 times their length to unravel. Pore over the liner notes of Destroyer’s Rubies and you’ll uncover veiled jabs at rock critics, endless references to previous Destroyer discs, Bejar’s customary harem of girls real and imagined and allusions to other artists. While the sheer density of Bejar’s writing can be overwhelming, Destroyer’s Rubies is, on a musical level, the most ‘accessible’ disc he’s released in years. Departing from the synthetic operettas and baroque dissonance of 2004’s Your Blues, Bejar and his band of West Coast aces deliver songs based in conventional rock paradigms. They’re an easier, more digestibly melodic listen, yet the most intriguing part of the songs on Destroyer’s Rubies is their meta-ness — every track contains sonic references to different moments in 20th-century rock, from the Hendrix-Dylan mash-up on Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever to the Pixies echoes on 3000 Flowers.
