Poison Season
Destroyer‘s Dan Bejar is one of indie rock’s most inventive wild cards. His last album, 2011’s excellent Kaputt, was an absurdist take on early-Eighties yacht pop. His latest asks a question: What if the David Bowie of Space Oddity and the Bruce Springsteen of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle were the same person? Bejar stacks rainy-New York sax magic, sad-astronaut strings and hippie jazzbo grooving to make songs that are as wryly hilarious as they are weirdly affecting. The peak is “Times Square,” a New York serenade that begins, “Jesus is beside himself/Jacob’s in a state of decimation,” and only gets more mythic from there.