Kaputt
Click to listen to “Kaputt” and “Chinatown”
Best known as the guy in the New Pornographers who sings the frizzed-out Bowie-esque songs, Dan Bejar has been making his own lovably pretentious glam-folk records as Destroyer for more than a decade. Bejar’s ninth disc detours into all manner of early-Eighties smoothness — glassy New Wave bass lines, blue-Monday synths, turquoise- sport-coat saxophones, backup singers straight off a Steely Dan record, all filtered through the obtuse, literary bent that turns Destroyer albums into such fun puzzles. Bejar’s lyrics are sad-poet spirals, glancing off politics, sex, drugs and music, and packed with perfect New Wave laments like “Magnolia’s a girl/Her heart’s made of wood/ As apocalypses go, that’s pretty good.”