By the start of 2005, much of the previous year’s optimism and stridency gave way to seriously bummed indifference, but Bloc Party wasn’t havin’ it.
Press play and the first sound you hear is a siren-like blare of an open E string announcing with all the subtlety of Funkmaster Flex that SHIT’S ABOUT TO GO DOWN. “I was the dominant theme in a number of places,” indeed: Bejar’s self-referentiality reaches its peak here as well- Rubies is the ultimate index of Destroyer mythology, the artist fitting himself into the background of his work. Taken all at once, Rubies is decadent, mapping a haute couture class system of well-off hipster intellectuals, idle painters, subcultural demigods, and of course, the beautiful women always just out of reach Bejar further cuts his observations with tweedy references to Ezra Pound, Tchaikovsky, the Incredible String Band, and Greek mythology. The tics and themes that make his music so undeniably his are all here, as is the shaggy jazz and folk-rock, the coy glam posturing, and the swatches of lives cast in abstruse metaphors. In the vivid worlds he creates as Destroyer, Dan Bejar is a cad, a self-conscious socialite, and the bard of a made-up bourgeoisie, and Destroyer’ s Rubies is his best-yet work under the moniker. Now that Wikipedia has spoiled all the Easter eggs, Night Ripper still sports brilliantly catchy (Big Boi Breeders), bizarrely virtuoso (Juelz Mangum Airplane), and oddly emotional moments (Biggie John) to tide you over as you squeeze a five-course meal into a piece of gum, Willy Wonka–style.
#THE BEST MASHUPS OF ALL TIME TORRENT#
All we needed was someone to step up and act as filter to the unstoppable torrent of pop music bursting our cognitive dams, saving us the time of listening to 500 songs sequentially and giving us the best parts in an overlapping and interlocking efficiency! But the flood of internet mashups were unimpeachable evidence that no, not everyone can do this, and along came biomedical engineer Gregg Gillis, the Michael Phelps of cutting-and-pasting, to be our beat-matching hero. Since multitasking is now our national pastime, an entity like Girl Talk was an inevitable phenomenon as our attention spans shrink to the nano-scale, one song at a time just no longer is enough. Listen: Deerhunter: “Spring Hall Convert”
And those miasmic ambient set pieces aren’t just there as breathers, but rather as emblems of a band that’s being perpetually melted down and reshaped from song to song.
The remarkable thing about the record isn’t just that Deerhunter deftly execute strobe-lit psych-punk squall (“Lake Somerset”), acidic disco (“Octet”), and sensitive jangle-pop (“Hazel St.”) with equal conviction, but that they make them all seem like logical points on the same continuum. Defenders of the album format in an mp3 age often point to the medium’s capacity to take listeners on a journey on Cryptograms, the journey is the band’s own. Back in early 2007, before frontman Bradford Cox’s every move was documented online, Deerhunter used their second album as a canvas on which to chart their aesthetic transformation. Never mind the lost album sales the abundance of leaked demos, YouTubed concert footage, and radio-session webcasts at our disposal has ultimately served to take the mystery out of the artist’s evolutionary process-it’s increasingly difficult to be surprised by a band’s new direction when we’ve been riding shotgun the whole time.