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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 be, it’s looked upon favor­ably, in gen­eral. It’s rated “Gen­er­ally Favor­able” on Meta­critic, for exam­ple, with two 60s pulling down the aver­age rat­ing to 79. And it has inspired some really inter­est­ing crit­i­cism. The same writer for the Yale Her­ald who slammed This Night, loved Your Blues, call­ing it “at once a fuck you and a seduc­tive hello.” Pitch­fork fawned over it, giv­ing it an 8.6 (a tenth of a point higher than Destroyer’s Rubies, even though the pub­li­ca­tion calls Rubies Destroyer’s best album). While I think that’s a very gen­er­ous rat­ing, I’m touched by the writ­ing, which likens the album to “the sound­track for a Sega Gen­e­sis game about kit­tens study­ing post-structuralism,” and wraps things up by say­ing, “Now, finally, the band­name begins to make sense.” Not that I agree; I think I’ve made the case that the name’s made sense since album one, track one, and that it’s been rein­forced through­out the catalog.

But, with­out ques­tion, Your Blues is a dif­fer­ent Destroyer. Where Golden Bridge through This Night were Che, Your Blues is Ghandi. Rev­o­lu­tion is still the aim, but Your Blues takes the high road. The MIDI orches­tra of Your Blues is just as dis­arm­ing as the out-of-tune gui­tars of We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge, if not more, but, some­how, it sounds eas­ier. The sounds are ethe­real, and at the same time, the songs are acces­si­ble at the core. I can’t remem­ber where I read it, but some­where in an inter­view, Bejar won­dered if peo­ple would think he was try­ing to sab­o­tage his own songs (or some­thing like that), and that makes sense. The melodies and lyrics are among the best that Bejar’s ever writ­ten. It’s just the MIDI syn­the­siz­ers that make it a dif­fi­cult album.

I’ve won­dered what Your Blues would sound like if it were recorded dif­fer­ently. How would it sound with We’ll Build Them A Golden Bridge’s slop­pi­ness or This Night’s loose rock n’ roll, or even just with elec­tric gui­tars and drums? I can’t say (because I don’t know, Noto­ri­ous Light­ning And Other Works notwith­stand­ing) that it would sound bet­ter or worse, but I’m pretty sure some­thing would be lost. In other words, if I ever stum­ble upon a genie, I wouldn’t wish for Your Blues to sound more like some­thing else. And if I did, I imag­ine I’d use that third wish wish­ing it back to the way it was (and not only because that’s how genie sto­ries always end).

On a few songs the inher­ent acces­si­bil­ity over­pow­ers the demands of the MIDI-instrumentation. The best exam­ple is “It’s Gonna Take An Air­plane,” which opens with an (actual) acoustic gui­tar and a (MIDI) flute. It’s too catchy and too pretty to be denied, and its lyrics are incredible…

It’s gonna take an air­plane
To get me off the ground.
I don’t blame any­one who isn’t stick­ing around,
’cause when you stick around, when you stick around,
peo­ple like to put things in the ground.
Now, in my
evil empire I
am going to be a star in the night sky
above. “So you think this is love?”
Yes, I guess so,
at least some­thing to make it from.

Other songs are more chal­leng­ing. Some MIDI sounds, like the horns on “An Actor’s Revenge” and what­ever that’s sup­posed to be har­mo­niz­ing towards the end of “The Music Lovers,” and the (I guess that’s sup­posed to be a) sax­o­phone on “Your Blues” sound overly syn­the­sized. I’m not sure how to elab­o­rate on that, other than to be bru­tally hon­est: it sounds a lit­tle muzak-y, and it reminds me of those really cheap accom­pa­ni­ment tapes my church used in the mid-nineties.

But like I said, the melodies and the lyrics make up for the muzak-ical dis­com­fort. “What Road” fea­tures one of my favorite lyrics in any Destroyer song, “I’d been work­ing on some open-ended shit / I was look­ing for an in and that was it.” I like that cou­plet more for its sound than its mean­ing, and Your Blues is full of lyrics that have great sound. The strange thing is that on Your Blues, the music seems sub­servient to the words. They sound clearer than on any other Destroyer album. But for the most part, and as on any other Destroyer album, the words are basi­cally music, instru­ments, ele­ments of sound. I’m sure there’s a zen koan in here some­where, but it’s yours to dis­cover and ponder.

The first time I heard Your Blues was, like Jacob wrestling God, a rev­er­ent strug­gle. One of my favorite songs was “From Oak­land To War­saw.” There’s a line from that song that sum­ma­rized the strug­gle: “You thought you’d heard of every­thing… Hell no!”