HAVE WE MET!!! New Destroyer album. It's fantastic. (And that's not just me saying it, there's a heap of good reviews for it out.) My swirly coloured vinyl arrived a day early and I just finished playing it for the first time.
An interesting array of sounds. I wasn't a big fan of ken, sadly, I adored Sky's Grey but a lot of the rest fell pretty flat for me, with a reasonably homogenous synth-led sound and phoned-in lyricism, from what I recall of it, which is rare for him. That's not an issue on this record, which is much more interesting musically and lyrically. It is still, I would say, synth-led, but also contains a heap of guitar and propulsive drumming. Lyric-wise, it is a Dan Bejar record through and through with more than its fair share of nonsensical Bejar-isms (my favourite being a painting titled 'A Girl And Her Broom' tied into the city of Nagasaki fighting with the Devil), but with a more sardonic bent than I've heard from him before - songwriters are called chickenshits, novellists are called Shitheads #1 and #2 and Cue Synthesiser is as damning a song he's written. And it also nails his modus operandi - "sing the least poetic thing you can think of and try to make it sound beautiful" - so well, there are several lines/lyrics that hit home for me, despite their relative absurdity.
Need more time with the record to deep dive more, which I'll do whether anyone replies here or not, but yeah, I really like it. Standout songs at the moment are Crimson Tide, Kinda Dark, The Raven, Cue Synthesiser, Have We Met, The Man in Black's Blues and foolssong, which is more than half the album, so that's great. The end to foolssong is infuriating, but hey, Bejar does and Bejar does.