Destroyer- Poison Season

I've had this thing for multiple albums now with Destroyer where I listen to them upon release and I'm either disappointed or not in the mood to grok what he's going for that time out. So they return to my list of albums to listen to someday, and at some point I'll get the bug to listen to a new(ish) Destroyer album and I'll think to myself "hey, this is pretty good, why didn't I like this before?" and hey presto, here we are. 

There's really just a couple things I want to talk about with this record, because Poison Season is the kind of solid but unremarkable album that an artist would be praised for were it a debut or sophomore effort. Coming as the tenth release--not counting his work in The New Pornographers and Swan Lake--and with no significant change in style, Poison Season can't help but fail to surprise us even as it also, happily, fails to underwhelm us. So:

1) The Destroyer albums that don't make my personal top five often have the same issue Poison Season does: the middle sags. Though I've developed (acquired?) a fondness for Trouble In Dreams, its momentum is sapped by the underwritten, overly long 'My Favorite Year' and 'Shooting Rockets (from the Desk of Night's Ape)', the latter of which fares better as the final track on the first Swan Lake album. Then there's This Night, which more accurately suffers from this "the middle sags" issue for most of its runtime--if ever there was an album that would be hugely improved by snipping off a minute or two of each song, and eliminating three or four tracks entirely, it's This Night. Meanwhile, the record we're here to discuss slows to a crawl after high point 'Times Square' and gives us a looser, more disco-y version of 'Archer On The Beach' (I prefer the EP version) and stays in this low gear for the remainder of the runtime. Thank baby Jesus he didn't end the album with 'Sun In The Sky' and instead gives us a mirrored bookend with a revisit of the opening song.

2) OK so I said earlier there isn't a significant change in style on Poison Season, and there isn't--the stormy, raucous 'Dream Lover' feels like it could trade places with the raunchier rock songs on Destroyer's Rubies ('3000 Flowers' or 'Looter's Follies'), the aforementioned rework of 'Archer On The Beach' sounds like the Kaputt era castaway it probably was, and despite its live/organic instrumentation, the sparse feel and lack of percussion on 'Girl In A Sling' actually recalls Your Blues. But the big change I do notice from Kaputt is that these songs are stuffed to the gills with layers of sound and orchestration. It feels throughout like Bejar is keeping us at arm's length, and his presence as the focal point of the music of Destroyer has never been more dubious. Whereas on Kaputt the assembled band seemed groovy, chilled out, and somewhat aloof, Poison Season is instead nervy, blown out, and maximalist. Often, even on the songs I really love, Bejar's vocals are buried in strings and/or a loud rock band vamping. 

To put it another way, you really have to work to catch all of his lyrics this time out. As he recedes and his band steps forward, we have to lean in and listen through the clangor. Perhaps no Destroyer album I'm as intimately familiar with as Poison Season benefits as much from headphone listening as this one; not even just to be able to hear all the different instruments and layers, but to isolate the lyrics more. Until my recent revisit, I genuinely don't think I caught the lines "I think I used to be more fun, ah shit here comes the sun" ('Dream Lover') and "someone’s got to go free, and someone’s got to follow" ('The River'), which good little Destroyerologists like me will clock as referencing lyrics from 'Notorious Lightning.' Anyway, I feel as though I've come off as more harsh than I intended to with this review, but when you've been a fan of an artist like Destroyer as long as I have, it's hard not to take the gifts for granted and focus on the flaws that could be improved...sort of like a marriage, really.