Destroyer

Related Content

• Moonface
  October 20, 2011
• The best national music releases of 2011
  December 29, 2011
• George Strait & Reba, Sleigh Bells, Cypress Hill shows announced. Tix on sale this weekend.
  February 1, 2011
• Matador at 21: Anyone got a spare, oh, $700 or so?
  July 6, 2010
• Of Montreal, Kayne West and Air Dubai fill our playlists this week
  September 22, 2010

More About

• Dan Bejar
• The New Pornographers

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Destroyer, by nature, is a band that conducts hyperbole. Its music is vast. Its scope is epic. Even its name is foreboding, in that late-'90s ironic kinda way. Funny thing is, Destroyer doesdestroy. It destroys indie-rock wussitude by channeling it into the sonic equivalent of a passive-aggressive apocalypse. Destroyer's Rubies, the new full-length from Dan Bejar's mercurial Canuck collective, reduces to rubble the crystalline digitization of 2004's Your Blues and then roots around in the ruins, banging on rebar and catching tetanus. Unlike Bejar's sleeker stuff in the New Pornographers, these ten chunks of neo-glam classicism revel in surefooted awkwardness and a certain shrewd hatred of songs qua songs. Like a lump of coal that can't decide if the earth's pressure will crush it or turn its guts into glitter, Rubies is Bejar's fragile, elastic masterpiece. And that's exactly what this record is -- the latest spark of Destroyer genius, one that's as sure to be overlooked as its six predecessors. Which, pardon the hyperbole, is about the biggest fucking miscarriage of justice in the entire history of mankind.