Destroyer, These Aren't the 1980s You Were Looking For

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 30, 2011 7:30PM

Adam Granduciel, vocalist and lead guitarist for Philadelphia indie rockers The War on Drugs, set the stage for the main act Destroyer just before finishing up the opening set Tuesday night at Lincoln Hall. "You guys are in the sax section," Granduciel said, waving a sleeve of his jean jacket stage right, "and you guys are trumpet," he told the other half of the audience. Granduciel may have been the spitting image of Jimmy Fallon doing his dead-on Neil Young impersonation, but what he was was the telling the truth and cutting to the chase. This sold-out crowd had come for the horns, and it was horns they were going to get.

Destroyer (the nom de guerre of Canadian songwriter and erst-while member of the New Pornographers Dan Bejar along with an ever-changing squad of bandmates) was in the midst of a tour in support of Kaputt, their startlingly acclaimed paean to the most reviled aesthetic legacies of the 1980s--smooth jazz, adult contemporary, obligatory sax solos. Though they found themselves in friendly territory, their demeanor suggested they expected hostile fire: it was soldier-like precision on the pulsating white disco grooves and mercenary relentlessness from crunchy fender guitars. Suppressing fire was laid down by ethereal washes of synths and rapid-fire arpeggiator runs and then punishing volleys of horn swells offered no quarter to the willing victims in the audience. In the middle of it all stood Bejar, an sm57 poised delicately in his fingertips and staring at the floor as if to deny the enemy the whites of his eyes, unfazed by the chaos unleashed around him. A vicious squelch of trumpet erupts behind him and Bejar doesn't move a millimeter, like Robert Duvall unflinching as a mortar explodes behind him in Apocalypse Now. "Don't be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves," he sang, but that no one would diagnose that affliction in this crowd, who bopped along to each of the Kaputt tracks.

Bejar's requisition of the abject '80s has proved timely, planting both feet where acts like Gayngs and Ariel Pink have merely danced around. 2009's Bay of Pigs EP was the invasion of that landscape, then Kaputt is wholesale territorial occupation. We confess to being suprised not only at how into it the audience seemed, but also how thoroughly the band's current incarnation has re-imagined itself in this guise. Though there were only a couple of non-Kaputt numbers, "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" was one of them and was one of the high points of the set. Other highlights included a justifiably epic rendition of the flute-laden "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" and the title track "Kaputt." And while the ever-present saxophone gets all the mentions because of its ease as a shorthand for Reagan-era excess (an era fittingly and definitively killed by Bill Clinton on the Arsenio Hall show), it was J.P. Carter's razor sharp trumpet, ricocheted and distorted by effects pedals, its feedback weaved perfectly in and out of the foreground, which stole the show for us.

The performance was excellent, but too resolutely focused on the new material. The legion of new fans won by the new album is real, and those fans got what they came for. The rest of us with a love for the previous lives of Bejar's vehicle were left wanting more. We missed Bejar on the guitar and we missed him betraying the emotion behind his literate scrawls in ways we hadn't encountered before. The Kaputt era is a disorienting time for the long-time Destroyer fan, but Bejar is not one to ever make it easy for his critics.