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“Okay, fine.” That’s how Trou­ble In Dreams begins. “Okay, fine.” A far cry from the “rev­o­lu­tion, rev­o­lu­tion, rev­o­lu­tion” that launched Destroyer. Kind of resigned, actu­ally. And resignation’s a theme through­out Trou­ble In Dreams. “Nah, it’s cool.” “The state cut off my arms.” “Foam hands.” “Now it’s gone, and the whole point of everything’s the mov­ing …

From Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wall­flower: The feel­ing I had hap­pened when Sam told Patrick to find a sta­tion on the radio. And he kept get­ting com­mer­cials. And com­mer­cials. And a really bad song about love that had the word “baby” in it. And then more com­mer­cials. And finally he found this …

In look­ing back on the Destroyer cat­a­log, I’m tempted to skip over Noto­ri­ous Light­ning and Other Works (2005). I’d be jus­ti­fied, since it’s an EP, and didn’t fea­ture any new songs. It revis­its six from Your Blues, this time with a full band (and not just any band, but Frog Eyes). It doesn’t read­ily exhibit …

In my last post, I said that Streethawk was my con­ver­sion expe­ri­ence, and This Night was my bap­tism. Your Blues (2004) is Destroyer’s trans­fig­u­ra­tion. Trans­fig­u­ra­tion leaves me out of the equa­tion, and that’s how I felt, and I imag­ine how many other Destroyer fans felt, upon first hear­ing Your Blues. As alien­at­ing as Your Blues might …

If Streethawk was my con­ver­sion expe­ri­ence, Destroyer’s This Night (2002) was my bap­tism. I don’t call it my favorite Destroyer album, but it does seem to be my ref­er­ence point for lis­ten­ing to oth­ers. I’ve already men­tioned songs from it in my treat­ments of City of Daugh­ters and We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge, I …