A Week With Destroyer's "Trouble In Dreams": Day 2
19 May 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Allison Felus // Illustration by Josh Johnson
Notions of homelessness abound on Trouble in Dreams. The characters all seem to be perpetually wandering around, living and “starving in that shithouse the world,” their “shit having been torched by fascists.” And, if not that, then they’re temporarily stopping in at hotels and cafes and hovels, where they’re either despised by the waitresses or “blasted on ecstasy.” Even the living spaces themselves register this absence as they exclaim, with typical Bejarian lasciviousness, “for christsakes, inhabit me!”
There’s obviously deep discomfort and discontent running through here, darkness the only thing that can be counted on when even the light deceives. If you’re having trouble in dreams, it means you’re not quite there, but not quite not there either, right? I think this might be a convenient metaphor for Destroyer’s working methods.
These songs are a joke. In the cosmic/karmic sense. “Hey, are they still serving that piss?” he asks in “Shooting Rockets.” Not just serving it, but taking it out. The too-gorgeous, intentionally obvious, overreaching archness of the music and instrumentation — from the weirdly U2-esque layered intro of “My Favorite Year” to the “Summer Breeze”-biting guitar line in “Shooting Rockets” — is playing at ideas of passion without actually being truly passionate. And I don’t think the intended effect is anything so simple as mockery. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad if we enjoy the music on a more or less surface level. (Well, OK, I think the canned strings in the “Dark Leaves Form a Thread” outro and the tinny organ in “Leopard of Honor” are mocking us. Maybe we should feel bad about those.) I think Bejar is reminding us of his disdain for the kind of lazy music creation and music consumption that relies solely on emotional affect. (“No one appreciates a professional anymore. Everyone’s a mystic,” he sighed tellingly in an interview with Pitchfork not too long after the release of Destroyer’s Rubies.) In purposefully creating so much tension between the song forms, the lyrical content, and their performance, he’s willfully troubling our indie rock dream world, exacerbating and exaggerating the chasm between our brains and our hearts. He’s asking us if we’re brave enough to admit that we’re all homeless here, if we’re clear-eyed enough to see that our homes are peopleless.
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yes, to echo and further the comment by MJ on “Day 1,” you, Allison write with such obvious affection for words, language, and the things your words are interacting with and striving to touch. Kudos and I love Destroyer; haven’t heard this album yet (soon!).