Destroyer
Trouble in Dreams
(Merge, 2008)

God bless A.C. Newman, but the songs on The Slow Wonder would exist whether or not he was the one who made them. We’ll always need classically constructed pop songs—and it’s a relief to have someone talented making them—but the difference between him and fellow New Pornographer Dan Bejar is that if it wasn’t for Bejar, there wouldn’t be anyone else to assume the mantle of making long-haired, poetic, singer-songwriter epics filtered through the sensibility of Eno-era Roxy Music. As in the case of the Roomba Floor Vac Robot, it takes an eccentric talent for invention to teach us how much we need something we’ve never heard of.

“A chorus is a thing that bears repeating,” Bejar sings in “Shooting Rockets (From the Desk of Night’s Ape)” midway through him and his enablers’ latest album. So what bears repeating in Trouble in Dreams? Well, not that tidbit. But: “Blue flower, blue flame / A woman by another name / Is not a woman,” in the opener “Blue Flower, Blue Flame”, a largely acoustic strum-along, finds Bejar’s nasal, conspiratorial vocals backed by occasionally unruly electric noodles suggesting themselves in the background. These seem to prefigure their more primary role, playing off a rising and falling electric keyboard in the next track, “Dark Leaves form a Thread.” (“No, it’s cool / You go, I’ll stay / Perfectly at home with this dread / Dark leaves form a thread” is what bears repeating here, though it gives way to a protracted solo taking up most of the 216-second song’s second half.) “I didn’t know what time it was at all” and “Foam hands… foam hands… foam hands”  bear repeating amid the background chorus, surly guitar, sludgy string section, tricky filling drums, and whistled outro in “Foam Hands.” Although Bejar can be romantic too, reaching for the stars with the aide of those ever-supportive backup singers and that ever-reaching electric guitar. Or anthemic, using the same basic ingredients to make a barrelhouse backdrop to “The River”’s cathartic declaration “You’ve always had a problem flowing down rivers.” Like the hypertrichosic mountaintop gurus he actually kinda resembles, Bejar dispenses his wisdom in cryptic koans, leaving it to his listener’s own understanding of the wisdom to be gleaned from them.

For the most part, though, Bejar’s the one doing the seeking, foregoing traditional structure and repetition for build-ups, digressions, lyrical musings filling time (except when Bejar prefers to hum, or la-la like his backup singer). Songs, for Bejar, are vehicles for ideas, and what separates Bejar from most people is his respect for the natural lifespan of his ideas, which are as likely to be tossed-off elements in a quick little ditty, or part of a multi-movement workout, as they are to provide the backbone of a verse-chorus-etc. He doesn’t shoehorn himself into a song structure, and repeat a thing that doesn’t bear it, but lets it play out over the amount of space he feels it deserves. “The State” has a pounded-out, mostly nonverbal chorus that he returns to after growling out some not quite intelligible mysteries; the lounge-y “Leopard of Honor” and “Plaza Trinidad” twist around themselves like a couple of the proggier soundscapes from For Your Pleasure. In the middle section of the album, the six-minute “My Favorite Year” and the eight-minute “Shooting Rockets (from the Desk of Night’s Ape)” sprawl all over the place with Bejar’s hyper-dramatic vocals (like Bryan Ferry narrating a bedtime story about gnomes or something), often gyrating past words, or past the usual unruly guitar and flourishing piano—the whole edifice contorting through multiple shifts of tempo and mood. Most bands would be lucky to put out a full album with half as much going on as Bejar throws into those not-even 15 minutes.

This, maybe, is one of the reasons why the New Pornographers are such an interesting band: Just as Newman’s mass-romantic compositions take on a show-stopping resonance when embodied by Neko Case’s throaty pipes, Bejar is a compelling harlequin figure, lurking in the wings and periodically jumping onstage to subvert the whole canonical shebang with a skewed gem like, say, “Myriad Harbour”, from Challengers. Not to say Bejar’s only interesting as a contrapuntal figure—Trouble in Dreams confirms him as a standalone talent of the first order for anyone who still needed convincing—but this album is a raw sampling of his gifts, the same ones that are sometimes diluted in solution, and sometimes catalytic.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]