The closing track of Destroyer’s Labyrinthitis—by far the cheekiest album title in the often laboriously arty band’s catalog—features a stripped-down arrangement of halting electric guitar strums and Dan Bejar’s remarkable, threadbare voice. With its hermitical vibe and esoteric, self-referential lyrics, “The Last Song” is a throwback to the band’s early days, when it was just a mysterious recording project for an introverted singer-songwriter from Vancouver. The couplet “An explosion is worth a hundred million words/And that is perhaps too many words to say” is quintessential Bejar, and a characteristically winking self-own for a guy who’s known for filling his songs with reams of bohemian poetry.
The rest of Labyrinthitis leans further into the dance-rock prism that’s defined Destroyer’s work since 2011’s Kaputt, and it’s replete with snappy disco beats, digital vocal manipulation, and free jazz piano interludes. It’s arguably the band’s most sonically ambitious work yet, but despite all that, many of these songs won’t feel unfamiliar to those who’ve been tracking Destroyer’s journey. “The Last Song,” for one, underscores the ways in which, for all the bells and whistles that the group has added to their music, Destroyer has come full circle.
Like 2020’s Have We Met, Labyrinthitis was largely recorded remotely, with Bejar and longtime producer and bassist John Collins transmitting ideas to each other from their respective British Columbia abodes. And so, just as it was when Bejar first started releasing solo four-track recordings under the Destroyer moniker in the mid-’90s, the band has become a home recording project again.
Labyrinthitis, though, is actually more of a full band effort than Have We Met, featuring indelible contributions from Destroyer’s expanded touring lineup. And instead of Robyn Hitchcock and Pavement, Bejar now cribs from New Order (“It’s in Your Heart Now”) and Donna Summer (“It Takes a Thief”). But as danceable and often hooky as these songs are, there’s still a sense of reclusiveness, an inscrutability, that permeates the album.
If a sense of isolation is a defining quality of the band’s songs, then the foreboding “Tintoretto, It’s for You” is in some ways peak Destroyer. Dissonant and disorienting, featuring Bejar singing of “the mythic beast,” “death’s tune,” and “the sound of your phone ringing and ringing and ringing,” it’s hardly typical dance-floor fodder. But with its thumping beat and honking brass section, the track isn’t exactly spooky or atmospheric either, defying categorization.
This is what Bejar and company does at their best: twist familiar elements into something unexpected. “June” sounds like an extended dance remix of an ’80s pop hit as imagined by a deranged street corner preacher who has somehow found himself DJing at a nightclub. Bejar decries “fucking idiots someone made in the snow,” croons his way through a heavenly breakdown with some of his signature self-aware wordplay (hilariously, an absurdly literal rhyme of “moon” and “June” is involved), and eventually breaks into a pitch-shifted spoken rant as the band’s silky and controlled groove grows increasingly frenzied.
But Bejar can also be a world-class melodicist, as evidenced by the pulsating dance-rockers “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread” and “Suffer,” the latter of which is as rousing a pop song as any that he’s written, including for the New Pornographers. But there’s still a darkness to it, with Bejar crowing about exacting revenge for past misdeeds over Nic Bragg’s screaming guitar.
Labyrinthitis only flags slightly when it gets less weird. The disco-infused “It Takes a Thief” is played too straight to provide more than a fleeting high, while “The States,” static and plodding compared to “It’s in Your Heart Now” and “June,” is perhaps one seven-minute dance epic too many. You never get quite what you’re expecting from Destroyer, but if there’s a formula to figuring Labyrinthitis out, as ever, it lies within Bejar’s enigmatic mind.
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