Destroyer – Bay of Pigs

I didn’t have much to say about the last Destroyer album, because it just didn’t really grab me, unfortunately. Hearing this it seems almost like the reason for that was simply that Dan Bejar might not have been pushing it enough for my taste, because it was a very restrained and, in my view, unremarkable record.
This, on the other hand, whilst barely even an EP, is much more interesting. It’s long, rather abstract, stitches what sound like fragments of songs together into a single quarter of an hour-long song, and is in general really quite weird and very, very good.
I still don’t entirely find myself understanding the pairing of the two songs, although perhaps the length of them is responsible for that, in that they both feel rather like sovereign entities, not necessarily requiring the other in order to be complete. Bay of Pigs itself is presumably about the bungled US invasion of Cuba which very nearly triggered nuclear war back in the sixites, although I’ll confess that the narrative of the song itself rather escapes me.
Anyhow, the song accelerates in vignettes, ratcheting itself up from the twinkling dreamscapes of the first few minutes, into some sort of somnabulent disco and finally a sharply-strummed crest around eleven minutes in. There it stops and seems to tumble downwards into the abyss of experimentalism again, with a building electronic rumble which allows the song to drift away back into the electronic twinkly with which it started. It’s a strange shift, at the end there, but it’s nice and it gives the song that completeness I hinted at earlier.
It hints at other Destroyer songs as well, interweaving the odd snippet here and there, and the second song, Ravers, is a re-working of one of their past tunes as well, previously called Rivers, I think.
So yes, it’s an odd release, this. A two-song EP clocking in at about twenty minutes in length and which really does bugger about something chronic. If Bejar is this good when he’s being weird I’d be tempted to say that he should throw off the reigns more often, stop being so disciplined, and just go for it, because I like this notably more than a lot of his more sensible, three-minute pop song-based work.
Erm, no preview song with this I’m afraid, because there are only two songs on the album.
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