Dan Bejar is a master of apocalyptic absurdity. In his work, unbearable heat is parrot weather. The Renaissance painter Tintoretto becomes shorthand for being dumb. “Crimson Tide” might be a reference to the Alabama football team and to blood and how it drips out of your body. As Bejar explains it, a crimson tide is also a lazy river, a vulture eating off the floor, “a circus mongrel sniffing for clues.” Over the past three decades, Bejar has built up a whole register of these images. He has created his own syntax and grammar. When he sings about television supervisors, Chinatowns in unremarkable cities, and a Ferris wheel on the run from the snow, all of it is ruthlessly in conversation with itself. His 14th record, Dan’s Boogie, is no outlier. It builds on this language and, like all Destroyer records, is a character study. The character being studied is once again Bejar himself.
On Dan’s Boogie, Bejar is a nightlife impresario. He is sitting in the green room in a velvet suit. He’s jetting off to Bologna for a long weekend. He is telling you that he wasn’t put on the Earth to argue with you. He is taking a puff from a cigar and reminding you that women fill out and men crumble inwards. If 2022’s Labyrinthitis was a record of all-night amphetamine disco, Dan’s Boogie is what you would listen to the next morning in your sunglasses on the train or drinking a vodka in the bathtub. The production is less manic, no four on the floor, no spontaneous drum machine bubble. Instead it is a record of complete control, full string arrangements, live jazz piano glissandos. Tasteful guitar squawk. Like a big sigh. A simultaneous “sunrise/sunset,” as he sings on the title track while synths pirouette and horns glitter in the background.
And all of it is familiar territory. The reference point for this record is not a specific époque of music or a lofty concept. The reference point is other Destroyer records, “a Poison Season/Your Blues mash-up,” according to Bejar himself. Dan’s Boogie is not a facsimile of its predecessors. It is funnier, wiser, though the stakes are perhaps a little lower. Look no further than “Sun Meet Snow.” Bejar is in the zone, free associating over horns, over imperial piano runs, a cymbal crash. It sounds live, like you’re there with him in the hotel bar. “I’m into it,” he says, winking, “If you’re into it.” It all feels effortless, like he’s been doing this for his whole life, which he basically has.
