Kaputt
Vancouver’s Dan Bejar has always been a sly kind of agitator, tearing apart the conventions of indie rock from the inside out. *Kaputt* turns the sloppy proclamations of his earlier albums on their head, opting for streamlined yacht-club funk in the vein of Steely Dan and \'80s Roxy Music. Though the music is soft and leisurely, Bejar’s lyrics remain serrated: “Hey, mystic prince of the purlieu at night/I heard your record, it’s alright,” he sings on “Savage Night at the Opera,” half-whispering with witty contempt.
Dan Bejar returns with a brilliant and accessible album that draws from the lush sounds of the early 1980s but never forgets the importance of songwriting.
Something strange happened to rock music in 2010: Soft-focus sax solos stopped being funny. Well, they’re still sort of funny, but indie groups like Gayngs and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti have reclaimed the smooth-as-Aja sonic textures that characterized the lite-FM songs they first encountered in the back seats of…
Always a cagey artist, Dan Bejar sheds his skin seemingly with every song. He’s a chameleon who changes color to suit a…
Shape-shifting Canadian pop craftsman Daniel Bejar's ninth studio album under the Destroyer moniker added a whole lot of Bryan Ferry to a pot already boiling over with copious amounts of Bowie, Dylan, and T. Rex.
Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar sings "I write poetry for myself" during Kaputt's "Blue Eyes," and it reads like a modus operandi for his adventurous will over the past decade.
Perhaps one day Bejar will cut an album for the unconverted, but Kaputt is not that album.
In recent years, I've forgiven some albums released in the '80s. Stuff like Bob Dylan's Infidels or Springsteen's Born in the U
Can a homage to a willfully unfashionable genre work? <strong>Alexis Petridis</strong> takes a trip to the unexplored side of the 80s
Destroyer - Kaputt review: Destroyer continue to map out unexpected territories with referential landmarks, with magnificent results.