Destroyer “Have We Met”
In 2000, after years spent thrilling Spanish audiences, Javier Bardem made his American motion picture debut in “Before Night Falls.” Since then, he’s established himself as one of our great film actors, whose physical and emotional gravitas is matched perhaps only by the mystery of what lurks beneath. He can ooze desire. He can burst with passion. He can seethe anger. He can lead an ensemble in arthouse fare or he can pop up as a supporting actor in a blockbuster. He’s an expert on all things AC/DC and an avowed climate change activist. He is a man of many interests and aptitudes. But his one supreme gift — the thing that he has over everyone else — is his ability to enter a scene full of movie stars, and then abscond with it. He did it with Tom Cruise in “Collateral,” Daniel Craig in “Skyfall” and Timothée Chalamet in “Dune.” It’s what he does — Javier Bardem is a scene stealer.
So is Michael Richards. Yes — that guy. Born twenty years before and nearly six thousand miles away from Bardem, the Angelino has — on the surface — very little in common with the Spaniard. Richards was a comedic oddball with a gift for physical comedy, bouncing around L.A. for years before he was cast in “Seinfeld.” Where Bardem has sex appeal, Richards has dufus appeal. Where Bardem casts a sinister spell, Richards has a knack for the ridiculous. Bardem is a flexible actor. Richards is a one trick pony. And yet, from the very first moments that he appeared in “Seinfeld” pilot, when he was named “Kessler” (not Kramer), Michael Richards stole every scene he was in.
Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, was not a scene stealer. He was a philosopher and a story teller. He was a great poet. As a singer, he was limited, but as a speaker of words, he was elite — maybe the greatest in his field. He could paint literal, physical scenes — in the Chelsea Hotel, on Clinton Street — and conceptual ones — darkness and knowingness — and, of course, emotional ones — dances and farewells. His voice — flat and clear — almost never wavered. His surprises were the subtle variety, never shocks. He was a handsome man — debonair until the very end. But, no, he was not a scene stealer. Freddie. Prince. Michael. They were scene stealers. Leonard Cohen was a scene setter.
If you took those three men — the suave Spaniard, the big-haired absurdist and the Canadian poet — and smushed them together, you’d get Dan Bejar, erstwhile New Pornographer, founder and leader of Destroyer and, depending on who you ask, the most interesting man in the world. The son of a Spanish physicist, Bejar was born in Vancouver and spent his childhood moving around before returning to Canada’s Pacific outpost. By the mid-Nineties, he was releasing literate, lo-fi records on tiny indies, while moonlighting in friends’ bands. But it was not until he turned thirty, around the time that Vancouver’s music scene really started to percolate, that Bejar’s music found its form. His songs more assured. His recordings fuller. His knack for phrasing. It was all coming together. By the close of the last millennium, very few people had heard of Destroyer, much less Dan Bejar — but that was all about to change.
Despite rumors to the contrary, The New Pornographers were not a “supergroup” — at least not when they formed in 1997. The only Neko we knew was “Nico.” The only A.C. we were familiar with had Freon. Their relative anonymity notwithstanding, The New Pornographers were superb from the start. Carl Newman was the consummate craftsman — even then. Neko Case was pitch perfect — even then. John Collins made everything better — even then. Bejar — the second guitarist, third vocalist and occasional songwriter — was in excellent company. He was hard to miss, with that big swath of curls and that splintery tenor. But rarely was he front and center. “Jackie” and “Breakin the Law,” from “Mass Romantic,” were great songs — bitter dashes to all the Pop sweetness. But, mostly, they were great palette cleansers. A.C. Newman and Neko Case were the main course.
The same might have been said about “Electric Version,” The New Pornographers’ obsessed over second album. “Electric Version” explodes right from the gates and never lets up — it’s a near perfect record. Without Bejar, it would be a Power Pop masterpiece. With him, it is still that — but it is also something else. Bejar (again) penned three songs, each of which stood slightly apart from Newman’s Power Pop. There was "Chump Change," with its odd time signatures and “lesbian rage,” in which sounds less like Bejar fitting into a mold and more like him swallowing the mold. There’s "Ballad of a Comeback Kid," which almost camouflages itself inside the jangle and harmonies, except that the lead singer’s voice is just too weird, too nasal and straining to pass for A.C. Newman. And, finally, there’s “Testament to Youth and Verse,” not the most famous or beloved New Pornographers’ track, but for my money, their greatest. It’s their “Hey Jude” — a flawless Pop song that turns into Van Morrison does the Beach Boys for its sparkling coda. People (like me) throw around the word “anthemic” to describe songs that make us want to sing along, loudly and proudly. “Testament to Youth and Verse” is not simply “anthemic” — it’s an anthem.
“Testament to Youth and Verse” was also the moment I realized that Dan Bejar was a bonafide scene stealer. And a scene setter. It was when I came to understand that this guy, maybe more so than the other guy, was the thing I needed to pay attention to. And, for a while, that knowledge felt like a secret. But it was not a secret for very long. Over the next few years, more and more people started noticing Dan Bejar. Onstage, alongside Carl, John and Neko, he was hard to miss. He looked different. He dressed different. He moved different. And, of course, he sounded different. There was the group, and then there was Dan Bejar, who really did seen like the love child of Javier Bardem, Michael Richards and Leonard Cohen. Outside of The New Pornographers, in Destroyer, however, things were weirder. Looser. Darker. Because of The New Pornographers, people started to check in on Destroyer. Soon enough, Pitchfork had a crush. That turned into love. Which turned into an obsession.
The Pitchfork affair culminated in 2011, with “Kaputt,” a blend of late Seventies “relax so we don’t get depressed” Pop alongside the offbeat, pop melodrama that Bejar excelled at. “Kaputt” was the rare album that succeeded poolside at boutique hotels as much as it did inside Urban Outfitters as much as it did at grad school cocktail parties. In the career of Dan Bejar, and in spite of everything he had accomplished before, there is “before Kaputt” and “after Kaputt.” After “Kaputt,” there was another Destroyer EP, a New Pornographers album, a collaboration with his wife and then, finally, another Destroyer album. After “Kaputt,” everything changed. Bejar was semi-famous. His clothes were fancier. His hair was bigger — and slightly grayer. Strangers wanted to talk to him. People wanted to hear what he had to say. And, moreover, what he meant.
It was right around that time that I stopped following Destroyer. Some of my avoidance was silly bristling at their semi-stardom — fear that the club was getting too big. But, if I am being honest, it was mostly Dan Bejar. The more interviews I read, the more I watched, the more I wondered if his absurdism was just shtick. When journalists asked him sincere, if fawning, questions, Bejar would often pause interminably — going to great lengths to demonstrate the depth of his pondering. And, nearly as often, he’d respond without responding. He’d deny obvious suggestions. He’d demure that anything was what it seemed. He claimed to disdain humor. He said that he never actually tries to write songs. If he weren’t so incredibly charismatic, his interviews would read as obnoxious. But because he is so charming, they present as maddening, but still intriguing as hell.
To most everyone else, none of this — the affect, the pretense — mattered. Bejar spent the last decade-plus as untouchable as he was inaccessible. Destroyer albums returned, jumping from one shape to another — just as they always had. Some were tighter while others sprawled. Meanwhile, band members rotated in and out. Amid all of the variance, however, every single record was grounded by three constants: (1) John Collins , (2) a creative thesis that Bejar could describe but would not explain and (3) a nasal tenor that phrased more than it actually sang.
If 2011 felt like a malaise (newborns, no sleep), 2020 felt like abject terror (president, pandemic). And so, in the same way that “Kaputt” was the right album for my year of malaise — palliative, abstract, absurd — “Have We Met,” from 2020, seemed like it might match my private terror. Maybe it was the isolation of its title. Maybe it was how Bejar talked about it as a “cold” record, inspired by Nineties Electro and Eighties Darkwave. Maybe it was how he described singing into a computer so that John Collins could “drape songs over” his ideas. Honestly, I’m not sure what drew me to this particular Destroyer record — whether it was actually terror or whether it was the possibility that it might be the lost soundtrack to a sci-fi thriller that John Hughes imagined but never made. Whichever the case, and for the first time in nearly ten years, I found myself deeply interested in what Dan Bejar had to say.
That, however, is also the Bejar conundrum — he has so much to say and most of it is alluring but almost none of it is decipherable. For instance, with “Crimson Tide,” which opens “Have We Met,” it seems equally plausible that he is referencing the 1995 Tony Scott film, starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington, as he is the line from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” But also, I don’t care. I don’t care about Bejar’s creeping English accent. I don’t care that he seems to pinch every word through his nose, as if he’s fighting through the flu, or how the song kind of sounds like Flock of Seagulls and also kind of like a more human Human League. Because by the time we get to the outro, where he simply repeats the title, like a mantra, with the slightest, but most meaningful, variations, I am hooked. All the halting and changing. All the “what the hell is he talking about?” By the end, when those odd notes have become melody and those slippery beats have turned into a groove, I’m in.
Though Bejar described “Have We Met” as “cold,” I’d say it’s more so “warm and cool.” His warble is oddly balmy — comforting and wise, like a grandparent experimenting with psychedelics. “Warm and Cool” is also the title of an out of print album of instrumentals by Tom Verlaine, released in 1991. Verlaine’s record sounds like flying saucers landing someplace lonely and far away at three in the morning — which is almost exactly how I would describe “Have We Met’s” instrumental title track. And like Verlaine’s “Warm and Cool,” “Have We Met” is the product of just three men. But whereas “Warm and Cool” was recorded live, in a room, “Have We Met” was made in isolation, through MIDI and file sharing.
Which is the tension of this record — the distance. The space between Bejar’s words and Collins’ melodic and rhythmic solutions. On the whole, the two men are in synch. Collins is familiar with the singer’s odd pacing and unexpected turns. He knows that after all the scene setting, Bejar will eventually want to lock down a groove and do some scene stealing. And while “Have We Met” does not sound very much like Björk or Air, it does possess some of the chill of Eighties Darkwave. It’s not so far away from Spandau Ballet, OMD and the stock and trade that John Hughes built soundtracks from. But more than “Pretty in Pink,” “Have We Met” sounds like late Leonard Cohen — dark and bracing, keenly aware that fascism lurks right around the corner.
In 1984, Cohen famously broke the fourth wall of songwriting, revealing the secrets to both his compositional slight of hand and his spiritual transcendence:
Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you dont really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
In 1977 on the title track to “Let There be Rock,” Bon Scott of AC/DC (Javier Bardem’s favorite band) pulled a similar trick, when he employed literal narration:
Let there be drums, there was drums
Let there be guitar, there was guitar
Many years later, during “The Bris” episod of “Seinfeld,” Cosmo Kramer proffered some of his finest, absurdist poetry:
“Somewhere in this hospital, the anguished squeal of Pigman cries out!”
On “Cue Synthesizer,” from “Have We Met,” Bejar combines a pinch of Leonard Cohen, a dash of AC/DC and a whisper of Kramer:
Cue synthesizer
Cue guitar
Cue synthesizer
Wherever you are
Open door policy and not a goddamn thing at night
Death threat scrawled in invisible ink's alright
Been to America, been to Europe, it's the same shit
Went to America, went to Europe, it's all the same shit
I look around the room, I see a room of pit ponies
Drowning forever in a sea of love
While those words are at least half obvious, their meaning is still completely opaque. Which deeply matters to us because Bejar has spent half the album setting a scene. But also, because, we know that if we wait too long, he’ll snatch the whole thing away. Which is precisely what he does. On “Foolsong,” the closer, he pulls the same trick he debuted on “Testament to Youth and Verse.” But instead of A.C. Newman, Neko Case and bells ringing “No no no no no no no no no no no,” it’s just Bejar, alone, crooning:
Duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh
Duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh
Duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh
Duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh