All Ages
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What is a “boogie”? In the common tongue, it’s a dance or an occasion to dance, a song or a shindig, an incitement to move, quickly, whether it’s on the floor or out of town, getting down or lying low. This being a Destroyer album and not the common tongue, the implications of a title like Dan’s Boogie are at once more alluring and dangerous. “A boogie is a hustle, a scam that doesn’t quite work, the moves we make when we’re up against it,” explains Dan Bejar. “I think of spy work, double agents, sleeping with one eye open, an eye on the exits. But I also think of petty street-level victories and losses and improv.”
Dan’s Boogie is a breakthrough album for Destroyer, both in the sense that it makes moves that no Destroyer album to this point has made, and in the sense that, to record it, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional barriers to write the songs. Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the completion of LABYRINTHITIS turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar gave himself a New Year’s resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution—“Cataract Time,” “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” “Bologna,” and “Dan’s Boogie” among them—are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his collaborators have established for themselves: spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy.
Lead single “Bologna” is the most radical frame for this energy, as it’s the first time Bejar wrote a song where he imagined himself as a supporting character. Taking lead is Fiver’s Simone Schmidt, whose voice—tough and expressive, piercing through the murk of the scene—is a siren’s call that haunts the album. The gravity of their voice pulls Dan’s Boogie into order around a sense of impending doom, the way a fatale’s promise of the unusual and the ecstatic dooms the principal character of an erotic thriller.
“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” is a delicious bit of contradiction, a peppy song that came out of the havoc Bejar was intentionally wreaking on himself—its holiday cheeriness making the angst of its lyrics go down smoothly until the song veers off the road. “We are now entering a new phase,” Bejar intones, introducing layers of guitar and synthesizer that considerably darken the palette as he alternates between singing and speaking. The lyrics and vocals are improvised, invented as Bejar recorded the demo in his garage—a manic stream-of-consciousness and simultaneously exquisite display of his songwriting mastery.
Contradiction informs much of Dan’s Boogie, the fog swirling around Bejar illuminated by the friction between competing truths and tastes, as when his interest in jazzy ballads runs aground on producer and bassist John Collins’ interest in bands like Led Zeppelin and Scritti Politti. When Bejar told Collins that he was thinking of Sammy Davis Jr., the title track bloomed into being, Bejar adopting a Rat Pack swagger with almost delusional glee against a dreamy soundscape of soaring guitars, lush horns, jazz drumming, spaced-out synths, and, perhaps truest to how Bejar sees himself, plinking lounge piano.
In terms of shaping sound, the centerpiece of Dan’s Boogie may be “Cataract Time,” an eight-minute epic that ranks as some of the heaviest lyrics Bejar has ever written, and one of Destroyer’s most musically intricate compositions. Borne aloft on an easygoing groove, Bejar’s lyrics—“a reckoning, a dressing down” as he describes them—are transfigured, their melancholy tasting almost counterintuitively like hope. It’s an intimate song that puts away Destroyer’s usual urban fable milieu in exchange for bracing interiority, but its lilting groove can see a future, one that Bejar and his band are eager to meet.
It is, to use Bejar’s phrase, the kind of song you make when you’re up against it, when it seems as if the world is crashing down upon you. And therein lies the album’s most radical shift: Where previous Destroyer albums were locked in combat with the world, Dan’s Boogie dances with it, its nine reveries coalescing into one long hustle. Dan Bejar’s eye may be on the exits, but he’s not leaving anytime soon.
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Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City. But his latest LP is a Chicago record in spirit. The masterful Course In Fable, the songwriter’s fifth solo effort, draws from the deep well of that city’s fertile 1990s scene, when bands like Tortoise, The Sea and Cake and Gastr del Sol were reshaping the underground, mixing and matching indie rock, jazz, prog and beyond.
Walker spent his formative years in Chicago, absorbing those heady sounds and finding ways to make them his own. Even though he emerged at first in folk- rock troubadour mode, it makes sense that he’s arrived at this point; each LP has grown more intricate and assured, his influences distilling into something original and unusual. To put it simply: Course In Fable is Walker’s best record yet, full of active imagination and endless possibilities.
Last October, Ryley went straight to one of the primary architects of the Chicago sound to make the LP. John McEntire, Course In Fable’s producer/engineer/ mixer, can rightly be called a legend for his work with Tortoise, Stereolab, The Red Krayola, Jim O’Rourke and countless others over a prolific career that now spans more than three decades. Seeing his name in an album’s liners is pretty much a trademark of quality.
Another Windy City exile, McEntire is based on the west coast these days, working out of the Portland, OR studio he’s dubbed Soma West. On the seven songs here, he delivers the signature shimmering and pristine sonics he’s become known for over the years. But McEntire was also intimately involved with Course In Fable’s overall creative process. “I told him to take the mixes and have at it,” Walker says.
The result is a rich, immersive affair — a headphones record if ever there was one. Course In Fable’s songs are twisty, labyrinthine things, stuffed full of ideas (Walker half-jokingly calls it his “prog record”). But no matter how complex it gets, the album is never overwhelmingly busy. Wiry guitars melt into gorgeous string sections (arranged by Douglas Jenkins of the Portland Cello Project). Tricky time signatures abound but feel as natural as can be. Melodies open drift in unexpected directions but remain downright hummable. Like Walker’s beloved Genesis, the pop element is never too far from the surface even when shit gets weird. (And speaking of weird, Ryley says that in addition to Genesis, much of the album’s inspiration comes from “Australian extreme scooter riders on YouTube and balding gear heads on Craigslist.” Go figure.)
To help put together these various puzzle pieces, Ryley assembled a band made up of several longtime collaborators. Bill MacKay (another Chicago mainstay) and Walker have made two excellent instrumental duo records of interlocking guitars and warm give-and-take — a rapport very much in evidence throughout Course In Fable. The freakishly talented drummer Ryan Jewell has performed with Walker for years now in a variety of settings, from straight forward song-centric sets to blown-out improv extravaganzas. Bassist Andrew Scott Young (Tiger Hatchery, Health&Beauty) has logged many miles on tour with Walker; he and Jewell are frequently astonishing, a buoyant-but-always-locked-in rhythm section, able to navigate sometimes dizzying turnarounds with apparent ease. Listening to the interplay between Walker and these musicians and you might be fooled into thinking they’d spent a year road- testing Course In Fable’s songs. But it all came together relatively fast, thanks to demos, rehearsals and the kind of musical empathy that comes from years of playing together.
Beneath the wondrous interplay, you’ll find some of Walker’s most personal – if still typically cryptic — lyrics, hinting at some of the trials the songwriter has been dealing with in recent years. Balanced with necessary doses of dark humor and oddball poetry, Course In Fable feels most of all like a life-affirming record, fresh air in the lungs, sun on your skin. “Fuck me, I’m alive,” Ryley sings at one point, a moment of both disbelief and pure joy.
Walker has released his albums on a who’s-who of independent labels over the past decade — Tompkins Square, Dead Oceans, Thrill Jockey and Drag City among them. This time around, he’s doing it DIY-style, putting Course In Fable out on his own Husky Pants imprint. You’re in good hands. This is an album that sounds great (mastered by Greg Calbi), looks great (artwork by Jenny Nelson and design by Michael Vallera). It probably even smells great. Whether you’ve been onboard since the beginning or are new to the Ryley Walker universe, you’re in for a treat.
