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Ideas For Songs (1997) is one of Destroyer’s most chal­leng­ing releases. From the penis on the tape’s cover (yep, it was released on cas­sette) to the lo’er-than-lo-fi pro­duc­tion (did I men­tion it was released on cas­sette?), Ideas feels even more arti­fac­tual than its predecessor.

Ideas For Songs fea­tures much of Bejar’s worst singing, cheap­est record­ing, low­est pro­duc­tion qual­ity, and slop­pi­est play­ing. Even­tu­ally, though, some kind of light shines through the cracks. Some (ideas for) songs reveal, more than oth­ers, what’s so great about Destroyer.

“Child Of Styx” begs, “Please, don’t call them like you see them,” which serves as a nice motto for Destroyer Appre­ci­a­tion. Through­out Ideas For Songs, the hap­haz­ard strum­ming of out-of-tune gui­tars and lazy tap­ping of tiny drum-kits hide rich, beau­ti­ful melodies. Forced, nasally singing obscures lyri­cal genius. Destroyer Appre­ci­a­tion can be demand­ing. What we see (hear) is not nec­es­sar­ily what we get.

“Song About A Girl Up To A Point”–which sounds noth­ing like Rubies‘ “A Dan­gers Woman Up To A Point”–is like the kind of poem that is mostly for­get­table, but which presents one or two beau­ti­fully poignant lines. In this case, “Your tongue is more than a tongue is more than a tongue is,” sticks out as a pretty clever turn of phrase, but kind of stays clever and noth­ing more. That’s typ­i­cal of almost every other lyric in the song, until the dev­as­tat­ing final line, “My dear, fuck you and fuck August.”

The high­light comes in “The Ter­ror Serves A Pur­pose.” While still sloppy, the play­ing some­times approaches tight­ness, and the melodies within the song aren’t as hid­den. The music is pretty, in spite of itself. Lyri­cally, Bejar plays with words and mean­ings bril­liantly. He con­trasts extremes using sur­pris­ingly in-the-middle lan­guage, singing, “From wife to mid­wife / From house to halfway house.”

In my favorite line of the song (the last one), he sings, “And we serve a pur­pose,” which, of course, sounds like a value state­ment in the pos­i­tive, stat­ing that we are pow­er­ful and pro­duc­tive. Then, Bejar twists the state­ment by sub­sti­tut­ing a pro­noun, this time singing, “And we serve it.” Sud­denly, we aren’t so pow­er­ful, but instead, we’re slaves to an agenda.

Not that the song nec­es­sar­ily makes sense as a whole. It ram­bles vaguely (inten­tion­ally), but it works. The two ideas that I pointed out aren’t obvi­ously con­nected, even if they do make more sense in light of the open­ing verse (”That’s one / Precipice we refuse to fall from / Strad­dling / Two famous worlds isn’t real / We’re cre­at­ing a third one / That is”). Well, kind of. But that’s what’s so endear­ing about Destroyer’s lyrics. Even if there is a point being made, it’s so obscured that it doesn’t hin­der the artistry of lan­guage. Bejar picks his words care­fully, and we don’t know why he picks them, and we are allowed to draw our own con­clu­sions, but in the end, we’re best off when we just admire the way he uses words.