This Week's Essential Reading
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10 Friday, January 28, 2011 www.thenational.ae The N!tion!l thereview The N!tion!l thereview Friday, January 28, 2011 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ‘American Music Legends’ A remarkable photo essay on rock music’s surviving dinosaurs, from Little Richard, 77, to Jerry Lee by Jamie-James Medina, Lewis, 74. Our favourite? An ageless Kris Kristofferson, 73, relaxing backstage in Connecticut music { Observer Music Monthly } playlist " The fretless bass and the fretfully base: a smoother side to rock’s jaded lounge lizards Roxy Music Death of an Avalon Warner Bros (1982) Brian Ferry was always the most urbane of the big stars to emerge in the glam era. With this, Roxy Music’s last studio album, he left the spiky experiments of his Eno period behind and created a much- indie man imitated adult pop sound that brought his crooning romanticism into sharp focus. Well, soft focus, anyway. Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man Columbia (1988) An abrupt turn into dystopian synth-pop for Montreal’s Over the course of a career filled of Kaputt where it is difficult to gloomiest folk singer. Cohen with flashes and feints, Destroyer’s Destroyer has joined his cryptic lyrics discern exactly what he means had shown flashes of humour Dan Bejar has established himself to some of the most unfashionable beyond the sheer sensation of in the darkness on 1977’s as one of the best, and most reluc- the words he’s choosing. In Bay Death of a Ladies’ Man, but tant, lyricists in rock. His songs are of Pigs, an 11-minute song that here he seemed positively almost always searching and grand, sounds imaginable. The results are ends the album in a mood of am- restless in pursuit of elusive truths. bient-disco release, Bejar begins gleeful, intoning “First we He makes a powerful case for the exhilarating, writes Andy Battaglia on a low note: “Listen, I’ve been take Manhattan – then we use of words like “sublimation” drinking, as our house lies in ruin take Berlin!” over a cheerfully and “hitherto” in popular music. includes painters, writers, read- concerns project outward just as / I don’t know what I’m doing / naff digital keyboard backing. His subject matter, however, tends ers, thinkers – in short, everybody well. Few writers of any kind can alone, in the dark / at the park or towards the deflated, the hopeless, who cares enough about culture to encompass as much about the at the pier / watching ships disap- the bleak – states of malaise that be disillusioned sometimes, or at state of his world in just a few lines. pear / in the rain.” That’s a pretty Scott Walker would seem to call into question least a little lost. It’s easy to feel a Take, for example, the following, good distillation of something Climate of Hunter the entire enterprise of songwriting little lost in the new Destroyer al- from a song called The Bad Arts on we can identify as despondence. EMI (1984) itself. bum, Kaputt. But it’s just as easy the first truly great Destroyer al- Destroyer But what about this, a little later Bejar, an indie-rock laureate who to feel that one is in the presence bum, 2001’s Streethawk: A Seduc- Kaputt in the same song? “Magnolia’s a From the Tin Pan Alley pop of started his ascent in late-’90s Van- of something big and urgent, on tion: “The world woke up one day Merge girl, her heart’s made of wood / as his Walker Brothers days to his couver, Canada, is a paradoxical the tip of a tongue about to tell a to proclaim / thou shalt not take apocalypses go, that’s pretty good recent, harrowing musique sort of musical idealist. He likes it secret. Bejar’s songs tend to work part in or make bad art / in these / sha la la / wouldn’t you say?” concrète, it’s a rare fan who so much, he can’t help but despair like that: cryptically. tough, tough times / friends like exhilarating effect. Bejar’s stated Listening to Destroyer some- could endorse Walker’s entire over how little music has come to It’s been the same more or less mine / would rather dash than dine inspirations for the album includ- times entails letting go of words career. Yet no one seems to like mean, even among those in the from the beginning, when the / on the bones of what’s thrown to ed 1980s Miles Davis, Gil Evans, and just watching them float or this ‘80s album. Ominous lyrics “underground” who claim to take breakout Destroyer album, 2000’s them.” Or this, from Jackie, one of “fretless bass,” and Roxy Music’s fall to the ground. But there are and quasi-classical structures it most seriously. He walks among Thief, became the subject of a Bejar’s first songs for the New Por- Avalon, a decent list of the most at least as many moments when combined with fretless bass to them but increasingly can’t iden- whisper campaign among those nographers: “Jackie, you yourself unfashionable musical touch- Bejar lasers in on a subject. In Ka- tify with their kind – which might who heard it. (Two other albums said it best when you said / ‘There’s stones currently imaginable. (Be- putt’s title song, he winds his way uniquely offputting effect. The mean that he hates music, actually. preceded it, but Thief was the first been a break in the continuum’ / jar has also talked about disco, back to a favourite old topic, music thing is, it’s actually really good. Either way, in song he’s constantly to attract wide notice.) Since then the United States used to be lots of though only the lightest kind, with itself, when he makes a surpris- poking and prodding, both him- it’s been a strange ride through fun / back when the man and the horn lines that could peal out of a ingly rousing chorus of “Sounds, self and his compatriots within a a discography marked by bril- myth / of the sands and the cliffs daytime soap opera.) Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME David Lee Roth fellowship he once dubbed “the liance as well as numerous epi- / composed a symphony to good Dan Bejar: his new material casts him as a debonair lounge-lizard in the mould What Bejar seems to be do- / all sound like to a dream to me”. Crazy from the Heat music lovers”. These are the peo- sodes of seeming self-sabotage. works / and better business.” of later Leonard Cohen. Jason Stoff ing, more plausibly than anyone Those are some of the British pub- Warner Bros (1985) ple who have, at different points Bejar is no fan of attention. When It’s one thing to write such wordy would have guessed possible at lications that “the music lovers” in their lives, subscribed to all the another band he was a part of, and elaborate lines that evoke so stroyer’s name. With Streethawk: to sound deliberately chintzy and ics, but just as many play out in the beginning of his career, is used to celebrate, and Bejar sings Before leaving the party-rock magazines, gone through big Bob the Canadian indie super-group much (the American Idea, historical A Seduction, Bejar established cheap. In 2006, the uncharacteristi- Bejar’s musical choices. He likes fashioning himself as a sort of remembrance of their romanti- juggernaut Van Halen, metal’s Dylan phases, read up on the histo- the New Pornographers, became rupture, bitter decay). It’s another his lasting role as a sort of impish cally taut and loveable rock album to play with the conventions of debonair lounge-lizard, a literate cised glory days with a bright, ris- most excitable frontman put ry of jazz, learned everything there popular, he assumed a strange thing to perform them in a way that cross between David Bowie and Destroyer’s Rubies found Bejar a taste, and he would never pass lech with a dubious worldview ing melody that could work in a out this EP of kitsch show- is to know about Joy Division and status as a “secret member” who comes off. Bejar laces his vocals – Stephen Malkmus from Pavement. wider audience; he followed it up on a chance to goad his audience and a thousand stately ways to credit-sequence song for a Disney tunes. Slathered in saxophone the Smiths. These are also people would write and perform on al- delivered in a sharp, slightly nasal Every subsequent record has ven- in 2008 with Trouble in Dreams, a in the name of surprise. Some express it. In that respect, he’s movie. It could be real pining, or and MIDI brass, it was clearly who spend at least some of their bums but not appear on stage. bray that is 90 per cent attitude and tured into something new. In 2002, spare and knotty record not espe- of this explains the hyper-sterile coming on a bit like latter-day Le- put-on grief. Probably it’s a little of a put-on. Yet the “I’m so sad time wondering what any of their And while he tours more regularly 10 per cent voice – with all sorts of the dark, languorous This Night cially interested in what a wider au- saxophone all over Kaputt, not to onard Cohen. It suits his writing, both, plus a whole lot more. pursuits have been worth. in his main guise, nobody could pregnant pauses and polysyllabic seemed like an attempt to make an dience might want to hear.