destroyer by josh johnson

A Week With Destroyer's "Trouble In Dreams": Day 1

13 May 2008
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Allison Felus // Illustration by Josh Johnson

There’s always that moment with a new Destroyer album where you’re standing in front of the thing, and it’s like this impenetrable wall, made of stainless steel or porcelain or ice — it’s cold and slick and hard and unforgiving. But then, a hairline crack starts to inch its way across the facade, spidering with the pregnant threat that it’ll eventually crumble down onto you like a smashed pane of car windshield glass, revealing all the rich, glorious, endlessly nuanced treasure on the other side. It’s a thrilling and terrifying moment, to be looked forward to, yet not forced or rushed, to be savored in its tension, for once the glass has shattered, there’s no going back. There’s no way to unknow what you’ve come to know — about the album, about yourself — no way to unhear the long, echoing well of depth that Dan Bejar packs into everything he sets music to.

The hairline crack does more than just cleave the protective shell around the album, though; it also marks a dividing line from where you can still see both sides of your understanding of this collection of songs — the place where it’s still foreign and abrasive and confounding, but then also the promise of the place where you know you’re going to end up drunk and addicted and lolling deliriously in the richness of the wordplay and song structure and instrumentation and those whip-smart and cheeky vocal tics.

That moment, for me, with Trouble in Dreams, was the final verse of “Shooting Rockets (From the Desk of Night’s Ape).” It’s a horribly monstrous, inky black pit of a verse on an album that, at first blush, is turning out to be a horribly monstrous, inky black pit in toto. It’s a cigarette and a blindfold, a defiant laugh in the face of the hooded robe and scythe.

The spider crack is inching, inching. And I have to try and keep myself from cheering it on.

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I love your words!

MJ | 14 May 2008

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