Forces unknown are coming “to hack us up” we’re “staring at oblivion” “the game is rigged in every direction”. “Actually, no, don’t look.” By the time we reach University Hill, paranoia reigns.
“Just look at the world around you,” opens The Raven. Bejar’s stream of consciousness keeps returning to disquieting places. In contrast to the image given by the cover – Bejar shot as louche crooner, mic in hand, shirt open to mid-chest – his words rush out in panicky bursts, struggling to cram in all the syllables. There’s a similar sense of alarm beneath the album’s shiny surface. However glossy the sound of new pop, it was frequently underscored by anxiety and fear, sometimes explicitly linked to the era’s nuclear paranoia, sometimes not: even the business of getting ready to go out could be transformed into a troubling psychodrama on The Associates’ exquisite Party Fears Two, a song that seems to echo through the plangent keyboard lines that stand in for choruses on Have We Met’s Crimson Tide and It Just Doesn’t Happen. Moreover, the set is rich with melodies: only the ambient ramble of The Television Music Supervisor obviously sounds like a product of the album’s working method.īejar has talked about being drawn to this brand of 80s music simply because it’s what he remembers hearing on the radio as a kid, but it fits here for reasons beyond nostalgia. Have We Met is rich with sonic signifiers of that era: sombre washes of synth, slap bass, booming drums, commanding, reverb-laden woah-Vienna piano, guitars that squall or cry mournfully – the entire title track is consumed by a desolate solo – but never rock.
As if to signpost where it’s coming from, the album contains a song called Cue Synthesizer. As on Kaputt, Have We Met’s main musical touchstone is Britain’s post-postpunk new pop moment, the brief window in the 80s when the desire to make music that was commercial melded with the desire to make music that was inventive and intelligent. The listener thus primed for 40 minutes of hard work may be surprised.
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On paper, this follow-up sounds more off-beam still – a series of offcuts from earlier work, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, taped in Bejar’s kitchen: “no re-recording, no cleaning up”. In 2017, the darker, denser Ken put paid to that. Kaputt, his 2011 homage to mid-80s British pop, over which New Order and Prefab Sprout’s shadows loomed large, was shortlisted for the Polaris prize, Canada’s equivalent of the Mercury, while its follow-up Poison Season made the lower reaches of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Whenever something close to mainstream acceptance has come calling, he has pulled back dramatically. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Bejar prefers to be cult. On Destroyer’s 13th album, Have We Met, you can take your pick from “calling all cars, the palace has a moss problem”, “I was like the laziest river, a vulture predisposed to eating off floors, no, wait, I was more like an ocean” or “the music makes a musical sound, measured in echoes by my famous novelist brothers Shithead 1 and Shithead 2” among its plethora of WTF? moments. If the stylistic lurches don’t put people off, there’s always Bejar’s voice – a mannered, etiolated, oddly Anglophone sprechgesang – or his lyrics, which, overarching themes notwithstanding, tend to the mystifying.
The wider world, however, plods on regardless.