Have We Met’s gloomy lyrics and pared-back instrumentation shouldn’t turn you off from what’s essentially a great release.
When I wrote about indie and alternative artists who significantly changed their sound, I noted how Destroyer’s 2011 release Kaputt was something of a turning point for the band. Have We Met might be a second one.
Nine years ago, Kaputt was Destroyer’s critical and commercial breakthrough. Their frontman Dan Bejar and bassist John Collins had appeared on every New Pornographers album since the group’s inception, but before that album had never really reached the latter band’s popularity. Kaputt made it a lot harder to think of Destroyer as a New Pornographers side project; since its release, Bejar has been conspicuously absent from the last two New Pornographers albums. Kaputt sounded nothing like Destroyer’s previous albums, embracing glitzy synths and smooth jazz instead of rock. In fact, it sounded more like the soundtrack to an actual porno than the New Pornographers’ power pop. The album paved the way for 2015’s jazzed-up Poison Season and 2017’s new wave-tinged ken, in which Bejar settled into his persona as the enigmatic, deadpan lounge singer.
Bejar is still this same figure on Have We Met, which sounds a little like ken and absolutely nothing like Poison Season. It’s Destroyer’s most scaled-back album since 2004’s Your Blues, embracing synthesizer, electric guitar, bass, and drum machine instead of strings or horns. It’s often minimal, occasionally ambient, a little bleak, and very much Destroyer.
The first thing you’ll notice about Have We Met is how stark it sounds. This is the kind of album where you can hear each note. A handful of piano notes create the melodies on “Crimson Tide” and “The Raven.” The guitars are all lead and no rhythm, allowing you hear each note as it’s plucked. The drums are mostly drum machine loops. Synthesizers are used to create backing tones more than melodies, and the bass is sometimes given greater prominence. There’s even a track called “Cue Synthesizer” where Bejar sings “cue synthesizer, cue guitar, bring in the drums, cue fake drums.” It’s not quite word painting since these instruments don’t enter right as he names them, but it does unexpectedly make you consider the parts rather than the whole. The distinct instrumentation on Have We Met ensures that each facet of each track sounds like it was placed very deliberately.
Occasionally the minimalism of How We Met is more literal. “Television Music Supervisor” appears four tracks in, serving as something of a first interlude. The song consists of nothing but airy synths, music box-like chimes, and Bejar’s voice with added echo effects. Without his vocals, it could be mistaken for a Sigur Rós cut. The title track serves as a second interlude towards the album’s end, although this one is completely instrumental. With nothing but a droning synthesizer and a reverberating electric guitar where each note pierces, it sounds more like Volcano Choir or British Sea Power than anything Destroyer has done. These tracks show an unexpected ambient side to Have We Met, but the last two tracks are more electronic minimalism a’ la the xx. Collins’ bass is the star on “The Man in Black’s Blues,” while “foolssong” has gentle muzak-y synths and a brief horn cameo. Both have a bit of the same soft, warms tones as Kaputt too. These songs help establish the album’s sparse setting, but err on the side of articulating Bejar’s machinations over accessibility.
On the contrary, there’s also a surprising amount of readily-enjoyable fare on Have We Met. Bejar admitted in an interview that, “As much as I try and buck against it, half of me always ends up writing half of a pop song,” and it shows. “It Just Doesn’t Happen” has one of the rare instances where the synthesizer creates a melody, delivering a nice tune that’s as 80s-inspired as ken. “Kinda Dark” draws more from the 90s, with its heavy bass and slow hip-hop beat either intentionally or unintentionally drifting into the oft-forgotten subgenre trip-hop. The opening track “Crimson Tide” ebbs and flows for six minutes, but Bejar’s rambling lyrics and a climactic build of piano, guitar, and synthesizer keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time. Bejar let Collins take the reins on the aforementioned “Cue Synthesizer,” and when he first heard it, he was aghast. His reaction: “What the f–k is this? This industrial funk-pop with dueling cyber blues guitars all over it?” Nevertheless, it’s a great song.
No matter how much the music changes, the great unifier of Destroyer’s albums has been Bejar’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness style lyrics that are borderline impossible to decipher. Have We Met delivers those and then some. It’s hard to imagine any other singer getting away with an album that opens with the line “I was like the laziest river, a vulture predisposed to eating off floors/No wait, I take that back – I was more like an ocean stuck inside hospital corridors.” He pulls off this lyrical retraction, but “Just look at the world around you/Actually, no, don’t look” on “The Raven” is pushing it. A lot of the lyrics show glimpses of darkness to complement the album’s relatively desolate feel, like “University Hill” where Bejar mentions being hacked to pieces and “the game is rigged in every direction.” Nevertheless, this song has the same conclusion as New Order’s “Thieves Like Us” – “it’s called love” – although Destroyer’s take admittedly isn’t as enthralling. These lyrics probably only make sense to Bejar (if that), but are par the course for Destroyer.
Have We Met’s gloomy lyrics and pared-back instrumentation shouldn’t turn you off from what’s essentially a great release. It’s hard to say if it’s any better or worse than ken, Poison Season, or Kaputt, since these were all exceptional albums that were distinctive in their own way. I’ll admit it’s hard for me to imagine replaying songs from Have We Met as often as tracks like “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood” or “Forces From Above” from those earlier albums, but there are plenty of ingenious and ear-catching moments lurking within the album’s austere atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine Destroyer going any further in this direction without becoming a post-rock act, and Have We Met might be a turning point that precedes a reinvention. Then again, the only predictable thing about Bejar has been his elusiveness.
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