Destroyer. Dan‘s Boogie (LP) (LP)

What is a “boogie”? In the common tongue, it’s a dance or an occasion to dance. This being a Destroyer album and not the common tongue, the implications of a title like Dan’s Boogie are at once more alluring and dangerous. “A boogie is a hustle, a scam that doesn’t quite work, the moves we make when we’re up against it,” explains Dan Bejar. “I think of spy work, double agents, sleeping with one eye open, an eye on the exits. But I also think of petty street-level victories and losses and improv.” To record Dan’s Boogie, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional barriers to write the songs.

Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the completion of LABYRINTHITIS turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar gave himself a New Year’s resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution “Cataract Time,” “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” “Bologna,” and “Dan’s Boogie” among them are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his collaborators have established for themselves: spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy. Lead single “Bologna” is the most radical frame for this energy, as it’s the first time Bejar wrote a song where he imagined himself as a supporting character.

Taking lead is Fiver’s Simone Schmidt, whose voice tough and expressive, piercing through the murk of the scene is a siren’s call that haunts the album. The gravity of their voice pulls Dan’s Boogie into order around a sense of impending doom, the way a fatale’s promise of the unusual and the ecstatic dooms the principal character of an erotic thriller.