Trouble in Dreams

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar specializes in baroque pop-rock that’s immediate accessibility is undermined by an active mind rambling with thoughts both precise and abstract. The Vancouver songwriter spends enough time getting weird to make you wonder what point he’s actually trying to make. Imagine Mark E. Smith without the punk abrasion or Momus without the literary name-dropping hang-ups and you’ve entered the mystery tour that is “Leopard of Honor,” a constantly shifting dynamic tune that swings from moments of whispers and random chants to swirling organ catharsis and back. It’s as if the song drifts without a beginning or end, just a permanent middle. It’s a bewitching ambition, a desire to find new psychedelic space without resorting to the trappings of that 1960’s genre. “Plaza Trinidad” operates with a high over-emotive weirdness. “Libby’s First Sunrise” reflects a (self?) realization that constantly avoiding ambition and career building leads to a directionless world of messing around.

By now, Dan Bejar's signature eccentricities have grown predictable, but they're still no less risky, and Trouble in Dreams succeeds despite both itself and contemporary notions of taste.

With a series of increasingly commanding albums, Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar has been doing more than would seem could be done to salvage the concept of ennui. The theme could play out in one of his songs: a semi-lionized, semi-laughable anachronism that gets misused, pretentiously overregarded, laughed at for the…

Dan Bejar must have gotten used to the full-band sound he explored on Destroyer's last album, 2006's Destroyer's Rubies and the touring that followed, because Trouble in Dreams presents an even more completely realized version of that (all but Scott Morgan returned from Rubies), full of strings and drums and horns, changing time signatures and soaring background vocals.

The consistent surprises that Dan Bejar’s vocals generate are one of the main things keeping these songs evasive and interesting.

I could be mistaken, but I suspect that Trouble in Dreams will be the only album of the year to begin with the statement “Okay, fine / Even the sky looks...