Late during the Destroyer concert at the Fine Line in Minneapolis on Saturday Oct. 4, a group of crowd members burst into a round of “happy birthday.” Destroyer frontman and songwriter Dan Bejar turned 53 that night, and despite his birthday going unmentioned by the band, audience members did not feel like letting it slip.
And why should they? Bejar, and his main musical project Destroyer, has displayed a cockroach-like endurance in the music industry. Destroyer has released 14 albums in its almost 30 year run and show no sign of slowing its roll — three of those have come in the past five years.
In a time when older musicians tour as a means of cashing in nostalgia on older material, Destroyer’s stubborn insistence to keep performing is admirable. They’re not just trotting out the same material, too, with those last three albums embracing a digital slickness brought on by the producer and longtime Destroyer bassist John Collins. In their live show, Destroyer continued to look forward – more than half of the music performed was from this three album stretch.
They walked onstage to an intro instrumental before immediately crashing into the bombastic “The Same Thing as Nothing At All,” a song from their last album, Dan’s Boogie. Bejar peered out, eyeing the crowd as the band played the song’s sweeping first coda.
The moment when Bejar began to sing, my enthusiasm took a slight downturn — his voice is a brittle, sometimes grating croon, and I had difficulty hearing the lyrics over the huge swell of chords — but as the song continued on, he settled into his groove.
Bejar possesses a one-of-a-kind stage presence — with his beard, piercing eyes and mane of grey curls, he appears as a mixture of lounge singer and wizard. When the band was setting up, I couldn’t help but notice the mic stand resting only a few feet off the ground.
The meaning of this setup became clear as the show progressed; early on in the set, the band entered a lengthy instrumental section and Bejar promptly sat down and began drinking from a cup of beer. Each time the band entered an instrumental section that did not require tambourine, Bejar would return to the ground, hitch his microphone to the short stand and begin drinking again. With another frontman this would seem contrived, but Bejar seemed so deeply committed to his own way of doing things that I never thought that he was putting on an act.
As a songwriter, Bejar is just as willing to skirt the edge of pretension. In his next song, the New Order-inflected “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood,” Bejar announces that he had a dream, and much of the band cuts off to listen to his important message.
He follows: “I had no feeling/ I had no past/ I was the arctic/ I was the vast spaces without reprieve.” More inscrutable lyrics popped up all throughout the set. During “Cue Synthesizer” he sang: “The idea of the world is no good / The terrain is no good / The sea’s blasted poem / Just a twinkle in the guitar player’s eye.” This is a ridiculous lyric, but it was delivered with enough conviction that I was able to appreciate it as poignant, inventive and knowingly funny.
This is not to say that Destroyer is defined by Bejar. The touring band, most of whom have been touring as a unit since the early 2010s, are all incredible musicians who served as a useful counterpoint to their meandering frontman with their precise, groovy playing.
They could get erratic and intense as well, often backing up Bejar’s surges of emotions on songs like “European Oils,” “Hydroplaning Off The Edge of the World,” and “Looter’s Follies.” Most songs played either fell into categories of “groovy” or “crescendo-based,” and each had their own type of lengthy instrumental section when Bejar could take a break, sit on the stage and continue drinking.
Individual instrumentalists got their own moments too — like trumpeter JP Carter, who played a long ambient intro for the exceptional “Suicide Demo For Kara Walker,” a personal favorite from 2011’s Kaputt. It was that song that really stayed with me as I exited the concert that night. Despite listening to it countless times, I was shocked by just how compelling it felt. If there’s any band that proves that aging isn’t inevitably followed by dullness and weakness, it’s Destroyer.
