Destroyer,
Kaputt
Look, I’m as sick to the stomach with all of the inverted commas 1980s-y, ironic-beard h*pster bullshit as anyone. But, y’know. This is 2011 – when it comes to searching around for new music that’s at least half decent, you’ve got to scrabble about for anything you can get.
Destroyer’s new long player, Kaputt, pushes the pastel-shaded eighties-isms as far as I’m willing to go. Often drifting into jazzy soft rock, complete with Kenny G saxophone, occasionally sounding like some 1985 wine bar music for men who wore linen jackets with rolled-up sleeves over t-shirts, thinking it made them look like fucking Don Johnson or something.
Here’s the thing though: it’s actually pretty good. It has a late summer shimmer that feels airy, soft-focused, and sad. And, here and there, as on the album’s best moment, “Savage Night at the Opera” (I know – fuck that for a song title, but bear with me) there are sighing synths, crystalline guitars and moody bass, like New Order or The Cure at their most languid. It’s music to softly play as you lick Martini from the hollow of the back of a coked-up teenage model on the veranda of your beach house, as a liquid sun slowly melts into the Pacific horizon.
