Destroyer’s Dan Bejar revisits the same song on three separate occasions during 10th album ‘Poison Season’ – his first since 2011’s sax-filled ‘Kaputt’ received rave reviews and turned the Vancouver-based musician into an unlikely star. Opener ‘Times Square, Poison Season I’ is a wry dig at record industry fakery, as Bejar sniffs at the sight of “Artists and repertoire/Hand in hand” over woozy strings. Final track ‘Times Square, Poison Season II’ takes the same conceit but turns it jolly courtesy of stamp-along piano that could have been lifted from the knees-up finale of a Broadway musical. And sandwiched somewhere between those two bookends is the radio-friendly ‘70s rock of ‘Times Square’. “Judy’s beside herself/Jack’s in a state of desolation”, sings Bejar in every one, but it never sounds the same: it’s once, twice, three times a different song.
For some sceptics, it’ll seem a wilfully obstinate trick. This, after all, is the same publicity-shy man who’s fond of publicly wishing he could make the world forget about ‘Kaputt’, which was nominated for Canada’s equivalent of the Mercury Prize, and the War On Drugs-style breakthrough it caused. Littering the follow-up with three variations on the same song could certainly shake off newcomers. But ‘Poison Season’ is also a record that’s gloriously nonsensical: unlike ‘Kaputt’, which was firmly rooted in ’80s soft rock, it manically flip-flops between jarring sounds and clashing styles. One minute, Bejar’s channeling ‘Born To Run’-era Springsteen with barreling riffs and blasting saxophones on the bright, breezy ‘Dream Lover’, and the next he’s swallowed up by the strange, stabbing strings and off-kilter orchestral trills of ‘Hell’.
The violent swings in sound are mirrored in Bejar’s lyrics, too. It’s fitting that an album that often feels like a determined attempt to dodge any pigeonholing is populated by characters determined to swim against the tide, from the doomed lovers desperate for “the right to be free” on ‘Forces From Above’ to the disillusioned New York girl who “despises the direction this city’s been going in” on sleepy ballad ‘The River’. “You make a plea for me to come to my senses”, he sings on the showy, brassy camp of ‘Midnight Meet The Rain’, as if eagerly anticipating the naysayers. They should keep quiet: Bejar’s dismantled the old Destroyer sound, but he’s built something wonderfully disorientating in its stead.