Destroyer - LABYRINTHITIS - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing, includes digital download. Of his 12th studio album and it's enigmatic title, Destroyer's Dan Bejar offers the following Sometime last year, I discovered that the original name for InchThe Wild OnesInch (one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so) was InchKen.Inch I had an epiphany, I was physically struck by this information. In an attempt to hold on to this feeling, I decided to lift the original title of that song and use it for my own purposes. It's unclear to me what that purpose is, or what the connection is. I was not thinking about Suede when making this record. I was thinking about the last few years of the Thatcher era. Those were the years when music first really came at me like a sickness, I had it bad. Maybe InchThe Wild OnesInch speaks to that feeling, probably why Suede made no sense in America. I think InchkenInch also means Inchto know.Inch ken was produced by Josh Wells of Black Mountain, who has been the drummer in Destroyer since 2012. The album was recorded in it's entirety in the jam space/studio space that the group calls The Balloon Factory. However, unlike Poison Season, ken was not recorded as a InchbandInch record, though everyone in the band does make an appearance. Album Tracks 1. Sky's Grey 2. Tinseltown Swimming in Blood 3. Cover from the Sun 4. Saw You at the Hospital 5. A Light Travels Down the Catwalk 6. Rome 7. Sometimes in the World 8. Ivory Coast 9. Stay Lost 10. La Regle Du Jeu

Vinyl LP pressing. In the hallowed Destroyer discography, the early trinity of City Of Daughters, Thief and Streethawk A Seductionholds an important place; for not only does it document Dan Bejar's evolution from lo-fi bedroom tyro to bona fide master of the rock album, it also contains a massive percentage of superlative Destroyer Inchclassics.Inch 1998's City of Daughters features some of the first steps out of the demo-tapey experimentation of earlier recordings, with songs like InchComments On The World As WillInch refining the sound of that stripped-down earlier work, and the seminal InchNo Cease FiresInch offering us the first taste of just what a full-band Destroyer might conjure. Album Tracks 1. Comments on the World As Will 2. No Cease Fires! (Crimes Against the State of Our Love, Baby) 3. Dark Purposes 4. Emax I 5. I Want This Cyclops 6. Loves of a Gnostic 7. Emax II 8. State of the Union 9. School, and the Girls Who Go There 10. The Space Race 11. Melanie and Jennifer and Melanie 12. War on Jazz II or How I Learned to Love the War on Jazz 13. Emax III 14. You Were So Cruel 15. Signs 16. Rereading the Marble Faun 17. Son of the Earth

Dan's Boogie is a breakthrough album for Destroyer, both in the sense that it makes moves that no Destroyer album to this point has made, and in the sense that, to record it, Bejar had to burst through a series of intentional and unintentional barriers to write the songs. Initially challenging himself to not write songs so the ideas would well up inside of him until they breached containment, the months following the completion of LABYRINTHITIS turned into one year then two, at which point Bejar gave himself a New Year's resolution to play the piano every day for an hour. That lasted about four days, but the songs Bejar credits as coming from that resolution-InchCataract Time,Inch InchHydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,Inch InchBologna,Inch and InchDan's BoogieInch among them-are all-timer Destroyer songs across the vast spectrum Bejar and his collaborators have established for themselves spectacle-laden pop epics, personal piano ballads, and smouldering works of mood that blur the lines between song and novel and cinema, each brimming with the urgency of a state secret in the mind of a tortured spy. Lead single InchBolognaInch is the most radical frame for this energy, as it's the first time Bejar wrote a song where he imagined himself as a supporting character. Taking lead is Fiver's Simone Schmidt, whose voice-tough and expressive, piercing through the murk of the scene-is a siren's call that haunts the album. The gravity of their voice pulls Dan's Boogie into order around a sense of impending doom, the way a fatale's promise of the unusual and the ecstatic dooms the principal character of an erotic thriller. InchHydroplaning Off the Edge of the WorldInch is a delicious bit of contradiction, a peppy song that came out of the havoc Bejar was intentionally wreaking on himself-it's holiday cheeriness making the angst of it's lyrics go down smoothly until the song