I loved Destroyer’s 2011 album Kaputt so much that after hearing it I had to explore their (or rather his) entire discography. For those unfamiliar, Destroyer is the name that Vancouver-based crooner Dave Bejar has used to identify his musical stylings over the past fifteen or so years. For recent Destroyer recordings, Bejar has gathered a group of seven fine musicians with whom he now consistently records and tours. On Kaputt, Bejar and his band produced a compositionally lush tour-de-force reminiscent of Avalon-era Roxy Music with a handful of expertly designed eclectic vocal moments lifting the disc to one of the most intriguing albums of last year. Bejar and band didn’t disappoint this evening at the trendy (Le) Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village as they delivered probably the best live set I’ve seen all year. To complement this kum-by-ya sentiment about the night, the show also featured my current favorite Brooklyn indie chick, Sophia Knapp.
Sophia Knapp
There is something seductively disconcerting about Knapp’s music. Although firmly entrenched in the contemporary indie musical idiom, her singing style suggests kinship with vintage pop singers from the 70s, and she owns the relationship by arranging tunes around her voice that sound like Olivia Newton John on acid jazz. I saw her perform in front of about fifteen people a few months ago when she was the opening act for Nite Jewel. During that short set, I found Knapp’s compositions so wildly diverse and her voice so disarmingly seductive that I was excited to see her play a longer show. I definitely enjoyed the set, and I’m becoming an increasingly bigger fan of Knapp, but the performance was shorter than I hoped (eight songs), and she didn’t get to the amazing “Weeping Willow”, which she sings with fellow Brooklyn indie artist Bill Callahan on her new album Into the Waves.
Fortunately, the disc is full of gems, most of which she performed, with the show highlight being the funkalicious tune “In Paper”. Alas, Knapp also had to battle through the crowd noise of some inattentive Manhattan hipsters through which she persevered admirably (her loungy, subtle tunes beg for smaller venues filled with audience members who actually come to hear music). I would love to see what Knapp will do with her headlining set this coming Thursday at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn (a much more suitable venue for her style) – wish I could be there.
Destroyer
Destroyer, which was once more or less a solo project, has really hit its stride and evolved from a vehicle for Dan Bejar’s cleverly unpredictable and ambivalent lyrics (“I took a walk and threw up in an English garden;” I love it!) into a fully realized rock group. Aside from the usual bass, drums, and guitar, the band also features keys, acoustic rhythm guitar, a saxophonist, and a trumpet player (the horn players are a centerpiece and position themselves at the front of the stage next to Bejar). I hesitate to identify a highlight from the show, because the entire set was outstanding. The live interpretations of the stand outs from Kaputt blew the house down – especially the ten-minute-plus final encore number, “Bay of Pigs”. More than anything, however, I enjoyed Destroyer’s big band reworking of Bejar’s older tunes such as “The Music Lovers” from the Your Blues album or “Destroyer’s The Temple” from 2000’s Thief. The performance of these songs included much fuller instrumentation absent from the low-fi arrangements of the old studio recordings with the addition of the horns, keys, and an extra guitar. These intriguing reinterpretations caused most of the songs to be aired out way past their studio run times – the end of “Downtown“, for example, featured several minutes of a frantically syncopated sax and trumpet duel.
Bejar knows he has something special with his current group of musicians, as evidenced by the frequent moments when he crouched to his knees and patiently waited for the band to finish out the pieces whilst he sipped from a hidden cache of beer bottles. One exception was the end of the epic tune “Rubies”, when Bejar cut the song short several minutes with the final lyric “Please don’t wake me from this my golden slumber, I’m proud to be part of this powerful number.” After which the music stopped and Bejar took a definitely deserved bow.
Here is a pretty good clip of “European Oils” taken by some dude standing in front of me during the show .
Here is a not great clip of a few minutes of “Bay of Pigs” from the show (taken by someone else who happened to be there). I post it because towards the end there is a shot of the back of my misshaped head.The first person to identify me receives the largest specimen from my toenail collection. Good luck!
The pics in this post are a combination of shots from my horrid camera and some fine pictures taken by Mark Shelby Perry for (Le) Poisson Rouge.