The Quietus

In retrospect, we can discern the seeds of this album’s existence hiding in plain sight in Dan Bejar’s discography, both as Destroyer and in other projects. From Kaputt’s title track: “Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, all sound like a dream to me.” Or, from Destroyer’s Rubies’ ‘Watercolours Into the Ocean’: “Listening to ‘Strawberry Wine’ for the hundred and thirty-first time / It was 1987, it was spring, it’s 1987 all the time.” Or the cover of New Order’s ‘Leave Me Alone’ that Destroyer contributed to Mojo magazine’s take on Power, Corruption and Lies. Or the recent djjohnedwardcollins@gmail.com remix of standalone single ‘My Mystery’. Or the precise, taut power-pop of The New Pornographers’ ‘War on the East Coast’. All of these previous lyrical and musical clues snap into sharp relief upon listening to ken, Bejar’s eleventh album as Destroyer. All of which is a way of saying that ken achieves yet again what every Destroyer album thus far has done: a balance of rupture and continuity, Bejar’s endlessly fascinating trick of simultaneously sounding unlike his past selves yet like nobody but himself.

Sounding like nobody but himself doesn’t preclude Bejar from being open about his influences. For ken, Bejar has ditched the amalgam of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell that animated his previous album, Poison Season; ken instead recalls the world of late-80s British indie, the music that Bejar listened to in, as he puts it in this album’s cryptic press release, “the years when music first really came at me like a sickness, I had it bad.” ken is named, in a roundabout way, after Suede’s ‘The Wild Ones’, but the influences stretch back deeper into the Thatcher era: the plangent basslines and pulsating synths of New Order at their stately 80s peak; the squalls of guitar feedback slathered over The Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy; the post-C86 pop of My Bloody Valentine’s early singles. From this rich brew, Bejar has extracted ken’s signature sound: a chilly, brittle monochrome, slick but hollow, coloured only by pulses of plasticky synths or faint scribbles of guitar feedback. The cover artwork represents the mood perfectly: ken paints its grey in grey.

The dourness of the production seeps into the songs themselves, which are some of the most quietly devastating that Bejar has ever written. Aside from the handful of more straightforwardly rocknroll tunes scattered throughout the album, ones that could easily have landed on The New Pornographers’ Whiteout Conditions had its recording not clashed with that of ken – ‘In the Morning’, ‘Cover From the Sun’, ‘Stay Lost’ – the album is unremittingly bleak. Perhaps its most accessible song, ‘Tinseltown Swimming in Blood’, has Bejar comparing himself to “the arctic”, “the vast spaces without reprieve”. The desolation intensifies in the second half of the record. In ‘Rome’, he addresses the listener over a cascade of thundering drums: “You keep hearing it said / You’re a doornail, you’re dead / You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.” ‘Ivory Coast’ opens with a declaration of defeat: “At night / I sit and watch the world go by / I’m never, never gonna try / For the world”.

There’s a braveness in ken’s songwriting – in stripping his style down to its barest bones, Bejar almost invites ridicule. Certainly those who have not yet acquired the taste for his songwriting might find it hard to swallow ‘Sky’s Grey’, which repeats the line “I’ve been working on the new Oliver Twist” seven times in quick succession with only minor variations in cadence. Certainly the opening couplet of ‘Saw You at the Hospital’ sounds like a parody of Bejar’s lyrical preoccupations: “Saw you at the hospital, your mind was insane / Your gown was on wrong in the rain.” And Bejar’s reputation as something of a crank won’t be helped by ‘A Light Travels Down the Catwalk’, a scathing take on the “bullshit” of the fashion industry. Bejar has never much cared for mass appeal, but ken reaches a new apex of take-it-or-leave-it insularity. It’s hard to imagine this record winning him many new fans.

Yet for those of us who have already become converts to Bejar’s singular songwriting style, there is an embarrassment of riches here: the extended saxophone outro of ‘Rome’; the poisonous hauteur of ‘In the Morning’; the moment halfway through ‘Sky’s Grey’ where the song pivots from a Your Blues-style Midi experiment to a fully fledged ballad. Bejar saves the best for last in ‘La Règle du Jeu’, an utter oddity in the Destroyer catalogue: it opens with strobing synth lines that wouldn’t sound out of place on a late-90s Gatecrasher mix, and builds into a high-energy take on arena rock complete with guitar pyrotechnics, over which Bejar spits some of his most archly spiteful lyrics. While Poison Season sounded like the kind of late-career ‘mature’ album that Bejar could be content to make for the rest of his life, ken shows that he is still full of the potential to surprise – and long may he continue to do so.

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The Guardian 80

(Dead Oceans)

In almost two decades fronting Destroyer, New Pornographers founder Dan Bejar has constantly switched styles, taking in everything from baroque pop to rampaging, Wizzard-style glam rock. His 12th album contains semi-acoustic strumming, hurtling shoegaze and shimmering Italian house, but mostly settles on a blissful, electronic pop sound that’s often reminiscent of a hazier, more beatific Temptation-era New Order. Old analogue drum machines tick, synthesisers soar and Peter Hook-type basslines twang, most effectively on the sublime, memorably titled Tinseltown Swimming in Blood. As ever, Bejar’s lyrics – delivered as conversational narratives – seem to hail from a parallel universe. Urinating brides nestle up against “dear young revolutionary capitalists”, with Saw You at the Hospital’s imagery particularly vivid (“Your eyes were clearly insane, your robes undone”). Named after the original title of Suede’s The Wild Ones, Ken isn’t quite as cohesive as 2011’s outstanding breakthrough, Kaputt, but makes another fine addition to the canon.

Drowned In Sound 80

The thing to remember with artists like Destroyer, or rather with songwriters as consistent as Bejar, is that, when a record arrives that is less impactful than the classics of the catalogue, its strengths can often be unfairly lost behind a sense of misplaced disappointment. The last Destroyer record, 2015’s Poison Season, was brilliant, but it’s a case in point. An explosive reimagining of the Destroyer sound, it was less obviously successful than Kaputt but it nonetheless contained some of the finest (and most imaginative) songs Bejar has written to date. Two years on, however, it almost seems to have been forgotten. Kaputt has undeniably been identified as possibly the landmark Destroyer record. What chance, then, does ken have?

Opener ‘Sky’s Grey’ poses some suggestions. An exhortation to “young revolutionary capitalists” which sees Bejar musing on “Bombs in the city, [and] plays in the sticks” whilst supposedly “working on the new Oliver Twist”, it’s almost a metaphorical translation of the unforgiving (perhaps impossible) task Bejar sets himself each time he starts work on a new record. Artists like Bejar, who are – of course – almost completely alienated from the music business despite being (relatively) successful, are eternal chroniclers in a world that sometimes feels rather fragile and temporary. What can such poets really hope to say?

As a whole the record is suffused with the musical influence of The Cure, which is surprising not because that band’s influence has not been apparent in Bejar’s previous work but instead because Robert Smith’s morose tendencies feel so distant from Bejar’s rather more relaxed (and pleasantly wordy) emotional lexicon. The guitars at times are straight out of Disintegration (especially on second track ‘In the Morning’ and yet instead of Smith’s laconic drawl we get Bejar’s breathier tones. The increased presence of synths this time around is notable, as is the subtler presence of Bejar’s collective of musical collaborators, who (on occasion) came to dominate Poison Season.

Lyrically, of course, Bejar has always been something of a magician, capable of bringing together stunning juxtapositions and remarkably poignant non-sequiturs. Things are no different this time around. The marvellous linking of “a death star in bloom” and “a rattle in the hand of a baby” on ‘In the Morning’ is a highlight. “I can’t pay for this, all I’ve got is money” is the real stand-out though. Write that in your scrapbook. Use it as a life motto. Reflect on how it frames contemporary capitalism as a soulless, vacuous destruction of the concept of value. Or something like that.

I don’t know where I’m going with all of this, but then, perhaps I’ve not really got anything to say. ken’s a grower. It’s not going to immediately colonise one’s affections in the way the best Destroyer records do, but it will slowly get there, even if some will immediately dismiss it as a supposedly 'weak entry' in the Destroyer catalogue. Bejar knows this. As he himself emphasises on the last track, these are just the rules of the game.

Pitchfork 79

Elegant and perverse, Dan Bejar’s latest album slinks around in the shadows like he did on *Kaputt*, synthy, sleazy, and newly paranoid. He remains one of the most evocative songwriters of his generation.

The Guardian 60

(Dead Oceans)

You never know what to expect from Dan Bejar, whose albums as Destroyer range from balladry to art rock. Ken, the Canadian’s 12th set, is informed by New Order in their 80s pomp, though Bejar’s lyrics are cryptic and shot through with scorn. “The groom’s in the gutter and the bride just pissed herself,” he sings on the lofty opener, Sky’s Grey, which starts slowly then grows menacing, its wintry riff energised by Bejar’s sneery voice. Over the course of the album, however, his mannered delivery grates, turning Ken, with two notable exceptions (Tinseltown Swimming in Blood; Saw You at the Hospital), into a twisted strain of cabaret.

Tiny Mix Tapes 50

Destroyer
ken

[Merge; 2017]

Rating: 2.5/5