A Week With Destroyer's "Trouble In Dreams": Day 4
3 June 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Allison Felus // Illustration by Josh Johnson
Right, so, but what does the damn thing sound like?
Trouble in Dreams sounds like there’s a box around each song and special care has been taken to let you know, on a track by track basis, which instruments, which bits of melody or rhythm, are outside that box at any given moment. If the borders and boundary lines themselves aren’t troubled, then each song’s ability to lie comfortably inside it is. You know how you can tell? You can tell because everything outside the box goes thump a little bit, like a late-nineteenth century spiritualist’s table levitating and rattling, convincing them what wants to be convinced that something otherworldly is in the room, while the truly observant know it’s just a trick done with a bit of wire.
“Somewhere applause falls dead on the hillside” Bejar sings on the “Blue Flower/Blue Flame” opener, while a vaguely hula-esque electric guitar drenched in watery reverb (watery? or dully smoldering?) shimmers in and out of tune around him, setting the stage for this recurring motif of dead, dampened sound that’s woven throughout the album, both lyrically and sonically.
The tinny canned strings in “Dark Leaves Form a Thread” give the first hint of how that barely warmed over sound might work: its plasticiness rubs up against the wonderfully organic churning drums and keening guitar as if saying, “let me in!” The counter-melody itself is light and simple and perfectly sweet; it could easily be dropped into a Shins song without much rearrangement. But the keyboard stop it is being played on keeps the tension high, reminding us, as listeners, even if we’re not actively listening to the lyrics warning of advancing terror and America’s sick churches of greed, that we shouldn’t get too comfortable inside these songs. We’ve got to keep one eye on the exit in anticipation of everything just going to hell in an instant. Or rather—now that everything has already gone to hell, we have to decide how much we can take.
And so the album goes, from the “blue broken drum playing dead” in “The State” to the actual broken-sounding, dead-flat kick drum that pops up as the most hilariously crappy drum fill in “Introducing Angels,” from the dropped object that tumbles listlessly to the ground at the beginning of “Shooting Rockets” (is this the sound of the potato cited in the liner notes?) to Jenny falling like a ton of bricks in “Leopard of Honor,” from the awesome tack piano in “Rivers” to the cognitive dissonance brought up in that same song as Bejar hisses about “wringing a bell’s neck” while a polite little string of sleigh bells tinkles openly and softly in the background.
And then the damn thing finally opens up for real on album closer “Libby’s First Sunrise,” a gorgeous track that could nearly best any of the sumptuous compositions on Destroyer’s Rubies. (Even this song doesn’t get off scot-free, though—the string line at the end sounds like maybe it was tracked in backward or something.) But as the song swells and burns, gesturing toward the emotional release usually signified by a strummy and wistful album-closing come-down, we can’t forget the danger that the notion of light has heralded throughout Trouble in Dreams—“the light holds a terrible secret.” And, if we’ve got our eyes clamped shut to keep it out, then the swap-meet keyboards and the rest of the sounds that go bump in the night will always be there to remind us what we’re missing.
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