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On March 18, Destroyer will release its (their? his?) next album, Trou­ble In Dreams. Until then, I’ll take a look back at Destroyer’s exist­ing cat­a­log, start­ing today with We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge. The Destroyer Wiki is immensely help­ful, pro­vid­ing lyrics and addi­tional album information.

I have an annoy­ing habit when I write about music. I tend to approach every artist, song, and album from the angle of rec­om­men­da­tions. Hope­fully, that run­ning list of 2008 rec­om­men­da­tions will help me get that out of my sys­tem, and free me to write about music with­out a bottom-line men­tal­ity. And writ­ing about Destroyer’s first two albums, We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge and Ideas For Songs, should be good prac­tice, because I wouldn’t rec­om­mend either to any­one but the most devoted Destroyer fan (who wouldn’t need a recommendation,anyway).

Dan Bejar’s got a lot of nerve, call­ing him­self “Destroyer” (with­out even play­ing hard rock, much less metal) and open­ing his debut album, We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge (1996), with a song called “Rev­o­lu­tion.” In case you didn’t know, that’s also the name of an anthemic Bea­t­les song. But Destroyer’s “Rev­o­lu­tion” comes more like a dec­la­ra­tion than an anthem. Most of the lyrics are weird (at best), and the music sounds inten­tion­ally bad, but the song makes a cryp­ti­cally impor­tant state­ment: “Destroy the norm / Rev­o­lu­tion, rev­o­lu­tion, rev­o­lu­tion.” The word “rev­o­lu­tion” is sadly creaked, rather than shouted or sung tri­umphantly. I think this is as obvi­ous as Dan Bejar ever gets: he calls for a rev­o­lu­tion against and destruc­tion of “the norm.” Not that he is all alone–a Pitch­fork review of the reis­sue of the album reveals Destroyer’s sim­i­lar­i­ties to both Stephen Malkmus/Pavement and Robert Pollard/Guided By Voices–but he is mak­ing clear his inten­tions to be sep­a­rate from the norm.

It’s a lot eas­ier (or at least more fun) to lis­ten to We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge as an arti­fact than as an album in its own right. Dan Bejar’s lyri­cal and musi­cal bril­liance is there, but it’s unre­fined. So, a lis­tener with a high Destroyer lit­er­acy can iden­tify early exam­ples of his tricks and trademarks.

In “J. Tai­lor,” we find Destroyer’s first lyric ref­er­ence. It counts as a dou­ble whammy, because not only does Bejar quote an Orange Juice song (”Con­so­la­tion Prize”), but he quotes a line that makes ref­er­ence to rock leg­end, Roger McGuinn. In “Leave Lit­tle Fid­dler (Alone),” we find the first mys­te­ri­ous woman’s name (Bon­nie). “The Pornog­ra­phers” seems like it could be a the­matic call back: “Rev­o­lu­tion” begins, “The one-hundredth beau­ti­ful crib death,” and includes the lyric, “Kill your first born,” while “The Pornog­ra­phers” begins, “I’m not sorry I killed the baby.” “War on Jazz” presents the first ref­er­ences to roy­alty (”a Ger­man Prince”) and the mil­i­tary (”your beau­ti­ful mil­i­tary minds sol­diered you on”). “Sad­de­stroyer” uses the phrase “guided by voices” as a phrase (while rev­el­ing in GBV’s typ­i­cal lo-fi style). “Streets of Fire” refers to a (whiskey) priest, call­ing back Gra­ham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and fore­shad­ow­ing Destroyer’s Rubies. And on and on it goes…

My favorite moment, though, comes on “Breakin’ The Law.” The song is actu­ally a good one (and it’s one of two on the album that was remade by The New Pornog­ra­phers, the other being “Streets of Fire”). It’s very well recorded and pro­duced (by this album’s stan­dards), and it’s a catchy song. It also includes one of Bejar’s clever­est lyri­cal tricks, in which he sings a phrase, and then repeats it with one context-changing word appended: “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me up.” (Side­note: My favorite exam­ple of this occurs in This Night’s “Crys­tal Coun­try,” which is embed­ded at the bot­tom of my About page.) It’s that kind of lyri­cism that, whether it means some­thing or not, blows me away.

The album ends with a noisy record­ing of Jill O’Hara’s “Know­ing When To Leave” (by which I mean, a record­ing of that song play­ing) along with other recorded/found noises. But the real last song is “Riots,” in which Bejar comes full cir­cle (maybe… kind of…). He sang on the first track, “Destroy the norm / Rev­o­lu­tion, rev­o­lu­tion, rev­o­lu­tion,” and in “Riots,” after promis­ing to strike up and bust up the band, he sings, “There’ll be riots on your hands.” So while most of the album is sloppy (inten­tion­ally, it seems), there is some abstract the­matic cohe­sion that is con­sis­tent with the rest of Destroyer’s albums.

Lis­ten­ing to We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge feels like a priv­i­lege, like look­ing at pho­tos of friends from before you knew them. Out of con­text, those pho­tos might seem awk­ward and unap­peal­ing, but in light of the rela­tion­ship, they become fas­ci­nat­ing. “You’re mak­ing the same face that you make now.” “You look so young!” “What were you think­ing with those clothes?” So forth.