Caught in the Carousel

Destroyer

Kaputt
Merge

Destroyer

The Term Paper Artist is a disturbing novella by David Leavitt that takes place in 1990's Los Angeles where the only shade available was that offered by Bret Easton Ellis' novels. Destroyer's new album, Kaputt, shaded by Roxy Music's Avalon, should have borrowed that title. Because despite moments of opioid nostalgia, Kaputt is a clinical study of all that trickled down throughout the 1980's after Avalon. That being sad, it's also a sad commentary on music in 2011 that this staid impressionist work is better than most of the stuff forced down the public's collective throat these days.

Much has been made of Daniel Bejar's methodology in the making of this album: the use of Andy Newmark's drumming on Avalon as blueprint for song structure while Bejar himself would record the vocals while lying down which, he claims, was the best way to approximate Bryan Ferry's vocal mannerisms at their apex (1985's Boys and Girls).

The opening thesis statement, "Chinatown" makes all these intentions very clear, including the midpoint arrival of a female backing vocal. The drums have that splishy 80's sound that came from post-Avalon bands incapable of finessing the sound. The floating sax between stanzas, the imaginings of flaneurs almost hit all the right marks, but by repeating "I can't walk away/You can't walk away" for the last third of the song, with only little more than a nod to Andy Mackay's oboe, shows that Bejar isn't quite capable of carrying the admiration to anything other than flattery.

Things don't get much better on the second track, "Blue Eyes," the first stanza of which opens with "You terrify the land/You are pestle and mortar/Your first love's New Order" and ends with "I write poetry for myself." One begins to wonder if he writes this poetry with colored pencils kept in a Hello Kitty plastic purse at the same time wishing he had kept his "poetry" to himself.

Other tracks throughout the album have 80's predecessors that remind the listener to just listen to the originals that inspired the tracks. The scruffy guitar opening of "Savage Night at the Opera" just makes me want to listen to Romeo Void's "I Might Like You Better (If We Slept Together)." Tracks like "Poor in Love," "Downtown" and "Song for America" among others—are at their best when they produce moments that have more to do with the best work from the unheralded 1990's outfit The Aluminum Group than anything 1980's. In fact, every successful attempt at Avalon majesty ends up sounding like that slight cream puff treasure of 1986 "Captain of Her Heart" by the Swiss duo Double (a duo who probably hampered any further success by insisting that the name of the duo was pronounced Doo-Blay). Mostly, however, the album's reachings seem to fall too short, and the product ends up being filled with more additives than Taco Bell ground beef: Howard Jones, Laura Branigan, Alan Parsons Project, Berlin, Haircut 100, Falco, Flock of Seagulls, and Duran Duran (listening to the blaying sax at the end of "Song for America" makes you want to double check that this isn't 1982 and you aren't holding onto a sail mast on Simon LeBon's catamaran).

The grand attempts at lyrical profundity ("Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" and "Bay of Pigs (detail)") have their moments—"A ransom note written on the sky reminds me, what in particular, about this wine I love"—but they can't even enter the same realm of Neal Tennant who was the true bard of the 1980's.

The drawback to term papers (other than having to write them) is that they are never the primary text. Their entire raison d'etre is to examine, deconstruct, praise, shape (and reshape), and to parse, what is already in existence. Book critics don't win the Pulitzers; the books they critique do. In fact, the ultimate achievement in such a field is the awarding of the critic with praise (Roger Ebert was the first film critic to receive the Pulitzer in 1975 and there have been very few critics since then to receive such accolades). So it's a shame that this time around, Destroyer doesn't make the creative leap above and beyond the source material. In fact, only the title track seems to achieve anything close to genius.

But Kaputt doesn't make it all the way to achieving artistry, because, as with so many of the songs, the Bryan Ferry-inspired vocals attempted while lying down never seemed to have been recorded. Time and again it sounds as if someone has always just entered the room, making Bejar sit up a bit, in an awkward position on the couch, forcing the vocals to detour from the diaphragm to the mouth so what comes out is the slightly creepy talk/sing style (not to mention the dry tone) of Al Stewart. And it seems odd that, for an album meant to use the 1980's as its axis around which the songs would rotate, no one bothered to tell Bejar that "Year of the Cat" came out in the late 1970's.

—Thomas Cooney