FILTER ALBUMS
Dizzy spells
The wonderful and frightening world of Dan Bejar continues its expansion.
By Victoria Segal.
Destroyer
Destroyer’s Dan Bejar: looking at things from a different angle.
★★★★
Labyrinthitis
BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
“YOU HAVE to look at it from all angles/Says the cubist judge from cubist jail,” sings Dan Bejar on June, one of the tightly encrypted songs on his thirteenth Destroyer LP. It’s a line that could stand as a mission statement for the pleasing disorientations of Labyrinthitis (named after a vertigo-inducing inner-ear disorder) as much as Bejar’s entire career.Synth-pop f lâneur; torch-song hipster; lo-fi poet: Bejar has rarely lacked arresting perspectives, a different angle.While Labyrinthitis still echoes 2011 breakthrough Kaputt in its love of New Order, The Cure and Associates, these songs come mined with surprises. “An explosion is worth a hundred million words,” he sings on faintly satirical folk coda The Last Song, “and that is maybe too many words to say.” Here, it feels the hyperliterate Bejar is trying to up the explosions – these songs feel a little more reckless, their compounds more volatile. June busts out in Close (To The Edit) playfulness, LCD Soundsystem at the creative writing retreat; The States sounds like Momus covering Into The Groove before radiating out into ambient trance.