Cassandra Jenkins is quite simply one of the best songwriter-storytellers currently making music. Hers is a specific and singular corner of the Great American Songwriters, artists like David Berman, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy and Sufjan Stevens. They’re artists connected by a sense of immediacy, not just in the writing – which is precise, evocative, brutal at times, pitch-back funny right when you need it – but by their delivery, by the way they sing with an immersive, total belief that carries you through their songs. These are the artists and songs that sneak up and really live with us forever, and on My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins joins their ranks.

What’s most remarkable about My Light, My Destroyer is it captures an artist at an exciting leap in her evolution. So much about the album feels of-a-kind with its predecessors; field recordings and found sound permeate, narrative songwriting crashes into heady, swirling compositions. Jenkins sings with what can only be described as a powerwhisper (think Sufjan Stevens, Annie Lennox, Margo Timmins or YHF-era Tweedy), her vocals up close and intimate but subtly confrontational. But it all feels bigger here, more finely honed, bolder and richer than her previous work and than her peers. Born and raised in New York City, Jenkins has been touring and performing since she was a child, self-releasing her early recordings before releasing breakthrough An Overview on Phenomenal Nature in 2021. On My Light, My Destroyer, many of the songs are devoted to specific feelings, and to really getting inside those feelings as opposed to getting inside a narrative arc. Lead single “Only one” is one example, as Jenkins’s asserts that a moment, or a song, can be wholly myopic; it can embody a singular feeling, and provides no answers.

Songs like Devotion, Delphinium Blue, Clams Casino, Echo, and Only One, speak to the liberating quality of focused observation, even to the point of disillusionment. “There’s this idea about disillusionment that I’ve held onto,” she says. “I really appreciate disillusionment as a process to discover new, unexpected outcomes. We let go of expectations this way. Expectations hold us back. It’s easy to focus on jadedness or disappointment but I actually see it more as freedom.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Devotion
2. Clams Casino
3. Delphinium Blue
4. Shatner’s Theme
5. Aurora, IL
6. Betelgeuse

Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? is of Montreal's landmark 2007 album. The album defined of Montreal's career and continues to be hailed as a classic. Pitchfork called the album "Ceaselessly fascinating and inexhaustibly replayable," honoring it with "Best New Music" and placing it in the Top 5 albums of 2007.

With Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, of Montreal has created its masterpiece. It is an irresistible and remarkable album, sounding like a logical extension of the erratic indie-disco sounds of The Sunlandic Twins. However, Hissing Fauna is also the most personal of Montreal album to date, with Kevin Barnes, lead of Montreal songwriter, pouring tremendous amounts of emotion, heartbreak, frustration and elation into its twelve tracks.

Written and recorded primarily during what they call "an insane year," Hissing Fauna sees Barnes adopt a new writing style. It's an unabashedly autobiographical attempt from a songwriter whose early material tended towards characters and story-songs. Barnes continues down the whimsical pop-funk path, while changing up its lyrical scope; and Hissing Fauna balances its poppy nature while showcasing brutal and unflinching honesty. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Suffer For Fashion
2. Sink The Seine
3. Cato As A Pun
4. Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse
5. Gronlandic Edit
6. A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger
7. The Past Is A Grotesque Animal
8. Bunny Ain't No Kind Of Rider
9. Faberge Falls For Shuggie
10. Labyrinthian Pomp
11. She's A Rejecter
12. We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling
13. Du Og Meg
14. Voltaic Crusher/Undrum To Muted Da
15. Derailments In A Place Of Our Own
16. Miss Blonde, Your Papa Is Failing
17. No Conclusion 

Destroyer’s latest album, Labyrinthitis, brims with mystic and intoxicating terrain, the threads of Dan Bejar’s notes woven through by a trove of allusions at once eerily familiar and intimately perplexing. The record circuitously draws ever inward, each turn offering giddy surprise, anxious esoterica, and thumping emotionality at equal odds.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's always been difficult to pigeonhole Destroyer, with a wealth of influence seeping into his sound from classic rock to soul and folk, as well as the core of classic indie anthems, so it's no surprise that this is a many-faceted treat. What is surprising is how far Bejar has come, and how each iteration of his sound is more profound than the last. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1 It's In Your Heart Now
2 Suffer
3 June
4 All My Pretty Dresses
5 Tintoretto, It's For You
6 Labyrinthitis
7 Eat The Wine, Drink The Bread
8 It Takes A Thief
9 The States
10 The Last Song

Have We Met, as Dan Bejar puts it, ‘came together in such a crazy way – all equal parts ecstasy and terror’. Initially conceived (but quickly ditched) as a Y2K album, Bejar was without a clear concept in mind. So he said “fuck it” and let it all rip while brainstorming at home. Culled from years’ worth of saved writing, set aside for projects “beyond music,” and recorded at his kitchen table, Have We Met harkens back to Kaputt-era Dan stringing together lyrics off hand while lounging on his couch. The resulting vocal sound exists in the sweet spot between two Destroyer worlds colliding: hints of the past, more strident Destroyer mixed in with a relaxed, new-aged Crooning one.

No re-recording. No cleaning up. Frequent collaborator John Collins was tasked with the role of layering synth and rhythm sections over a stream-of-consciousness Bejar, as Nic Bragg added ‘completely unexpected and somehow comforting’ three-dimensional, shredding guitar. The Destroyer band-orientated approach was shelved; “The record could have gone on and on, and the mixes kept evolving up until about a day before we sent them off to be mastered, which was also 48 hours before John and his wife went to the birthing centre, where their first child was born; our true deadline!” says Bejar.

Opener ‘Crimson Tide’ is a six-minute journey that takes its rightful place among other Destroyer epics. It welcomes with a sparse rhythm until percolating synths and propulsive bass build and make it all a reality with unsustainable imagery — oceans stuck inside hospital corridors and insane funerals. It’s the sound of a somewhat eccentric and unorthodox recording process laid out and built up by three musicians exploring the depth to which they can take an idea.

On “The Television Music Supervisor,” trickling keys, glitches, and “clickity click clicks” (a variation on the standard Bejar “la da das”) focuses on how those who dictate our relationships with music and media are susceptible to error, a most 21st century concern. Perhaps the most audacious Destroyer track yet, “Cue Synthesizer” steps back to address the rote and often-detached mechanics of music. Up next, the waltzy and woozy centerpiece “University Hill” drifts even further and applies that logic more broadly, insisting “the game is rigged in every direction” and “you’re made of string.”

Thirteen albums in, Have We Met manages to meet somewhere between trademarks and new territory – atmospheric approximations of feeling and place, wry gut-punches of one liners, and the deluge of energy meets a thematic catharsis of modern dread, delivered with an effortless, entrancing directness. But, no need to expound any further. He's got it all spelled out for you in the music.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: While still retaining the slightly oddball lounge aesthetic, 'Have We Met' takes all of Destroyer's myriad sounds and skilfully crafts them into an album full of twists and turns, brimming with warmth and rarely overproduced, Bejar is at his creative best.

TRACK LISTING

1. Crimson Tide
2. Kinda Dark
3. It Just Doesn’t Happen
4. The Television Music Supervisor
5. The Raven
6. Cue Synthesizer
7. University Hill
8. Have We Met
9. The Man In Black’s Blues
10. Foolssong

Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean turned 16 way back in 1985. And yet, until just two short years ago, McBean had lived his entire adolescence and adult life without a proper driver’s license, that first and most coveted ticket to personal independence. When he did finally take the wheel in 2017, he essentially became a 48-year-old Sixteen Year Old, blowing out the doors off the DMV like a pyrotechnics display at a W.A.S.P. gig. Black Mountain’s new album, Destroyer, named after the discontinued single-run 1985 Dodge Destroyer muscle car, is imbued with all that wild-ass freedom and newfound agency (and anxiety and fear) that comes with one's first time behind the wheel. McBean, welding mask pulled over his Alan Watts beard, has even been rebuilding a 1985 Destroyer in his step-dad’s garage all spring — building it from its frame, putting in weekends of work to have this beast ready for sunnier days. And wouldn’t you know it: when the Destoyer's engine gives its deep snarl and the stereo rattles with Metallica's $5.98 EP, McBean is fully in the driver’s seat.

Destroyer is structured around that first time behind the wheel of a hot rod. The fat, charging “Living After Midnight” riffs of opener “Future Shade” is, according to McBean, “Straight outta the gates. FM radio cranked.” He ain’t kidding. The song, and all of Destroyer for that matter, seems to exist at that crucial nexus of the early-to-mid 80s Los Angeles when a war between punk and hair metal was waged. Black Flag’s My War tried and failed to keep the peace. But in the trenches, some hybrid ghoul was beginning to form in bands like Jane’s Addiction and White Zombie. The heavy extended player “Horns Arising,” with its Night Rider vocals and golden, climbing Blade Runner synths, is a fill-up at a desert gas station just in time to see a UFO hovering near a mesa. . And other songs, like The serpentine “Boogie Lover” is a cruise down the Sunset Strip. You pull into The Rainbow Bar & Grill to take the edge off. Doesn’t matter what year it is, Lemmy’s there in flesh or spirit. To continue the teenage theme, there’s also a sense of to these cuts — “High Rise” is a foray into Japanese psych, rounding the bend to a careening, youthful sense of discovery, while “Closer to the Edge” feeling like falling in love with Yes (Remember how good they were for a minute there in your youth?). “Licensed to Drive” would easily be the most exhilarating and dangerous ripper on a titular film’s soundtrack, a dose of heavy right before the muscle car’s wheels fly off going 100 mph on the freeway.

Shacked up in his rehearsal space, McBean found an old chair in an alley, spray painted Producer on the back and pressed record. Friends from the endless rock’n’roll highway were invited over and 22 songs were brought to life. And while some were laid back into shallow graves to dig up once again at a later date, the remaining skeletons were left above ground — given organs, skin, eyes, and the opportunity to grow their hair real long and greasy. Some of these zombie hesher jams were sent on a journey to Canada where longtime band member Jeremy Schmidt, slipping on the Official Collaborator satin jacket, had at them with his legendary synth arsenal. As he added long flowing robes, sunglasses, driving gloves and medallions, the undead songs began to transform into the new breathing creatures that make up Destroyer. Schmidt’s work with these songs was the needed transformative glue for this new era of Black Mountain.

Coming off his newfound automotive freedom, McBean also saw some personnel shuffling within Black Mountain. Both Joshua Wells and Amber Webber have retired their Black Mountain Army uniforms while Arjan Miranda paid his outstanding membership dues and rejoined. New members include Rachel Fannan (Sleepy Sun) and Bulgasem (Dommengang & Soft Kill) plus other familiar names like Kliph Scurlock (Flaming Lips), Kid Millions (Oneida), and John Congleton (St Vincent, Swans) take a turn in the shotgun seat. Collectively, there’s a renewed vitality to Black Mountain on Destroyer — a seasoned, veteran of heady hard rock that’s found new, young muscles to flex and roads to explore.

STAFF COMMENTS

Mine says: On their 5th album, psych rockers Black Mountain go big. Less psych, more rock, Destroyer might be their most powerful and driving album to date.

TRACK LISTING

1. Future Shade
2. Horns Arising
3. Closer To The Edge
4. High Rise
5. Pretty Little Lazies
6. Boogie Lover
7. Licensed To Drive
8. FD’72

“From the ominous, post-punkish pulse and clang of opener ‘Monkey’, to the decidedly punky frustration of ‘Everybody’s Song’ and the unapologetic riffing of ‘California’, ‘The Great Destroyer’ pushes the band's sound on to thrilling new vistas” - The Guardian

Formed in 1993, Low are a trio from Duluth, Minnesota comprised of guitarist/vocalist Alan Sparhawk, percussionist/vocalist Mimi Parker and bassist Zak Sally.

Initially garnering attention as leaders of the ‘90s slowcore movement, Low went on to develop a sonic repertoire that incorporated pop, R&B and dissonant rock ‘n’ roll. With this kind of storied history, most people thought they had Low pegged. But then they turned in ‘The Great Destroyer’.

The band’s seventh full-length album, ‘The Great Destroyer’ is fascinating in that it blends the band’s austere melodies (‘On the Edge Of’, ‘Silver Rider’) with an aggressive guitar onslaught (‘Monkey’, ‘Everybody’s Song’) and even melds Low’s varied styles together into a single song (‘When I Go Deaf’).

Co-produced by Low and David Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev), ‘The Great Destroyer’ was a welcome surprise and, in the end, a rock ‘n’ roll revelation.

TRACK LISTING

Monkey
California
Everybody’s Song
Silver Rider
Just Stand Back
On The Edge Of
Cue The Strings
Step
When I Go Deaf
Broadway (So Many People)
Pissing
Death Of A Salesman
Walk Into The Sea

Of his 12th studio album and its enigmatic title, Destroyer’s Dan Bejar offers the following:

Sometime last year, I discovered that the original name for “The Wild Ones” (one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so) was “Ken.” 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 “TheWild Ones” speaks to that feeling, probably why Suede made no sense in America. I think “ken” also means “to know.”

ken was produced by Josh Wells of Black Mountain, who has been the drummer in Destroyer since 2012. The album was recorded in its entirety in the jam space/studio space that the group calls The Balloon Factory. However, unlike Poison Season, ken was not recorded as a “band” record, though everyone in the band does make an appearance.

TRACK LISTING

1 Sky's Grey
2 In The Morning
3 Tinseltown Swimming In Blood
4 Cover From The Sun
5 Saw You At The Hospital
6 A Light Travels Down The Catwalk
7 Rome
8 Sometimes In The World
9 Ivory Coast
10 Stay Lost
11 La Regle De Jeu

Recorded one track at a time at Guitar Center, completely in secret, Apprentice Destroyer’s debut Glass Ceiling Universe transcends its intriguing concept to highlight a hyperactive and omnivorous talent within. These wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic instrumental compositions veer from the disorientingly complex to the achingly and delicately beautiful, all the while maintaining a metallic, misanthropic edge. It’s almost as if computers were playing to each other across the sales floor, laughing at the puny humans attempting to create harmonics in air when they can do so perfectly in the vacuum of binary. Glass Ceiling Universe is lifestyle music for all the cyborg assassins out there, and it’s out on Castle Face Records.

Destroyer's Poison Season opens swathed in Hunky Dory strings. Dan Bejar’s a dashboard Bowie surveying four wracked characters—Jesus, Jacob, Judy, Jack—simultaneously Biblical and musical theatre. This bittersweet, Times Square-set fanfare is reprised twice more on the record—first as swaying, saxophone-stoked “street-rock” and then finally as a curtain-closing reverie.

Broadway Danny Bejar dramatically switches scenes with “Dream Lover,” all Style Council strut and brassy, radio-ready bombast (echoes of The Boo Radleys’ evergreen earworm “Wake Up Boo!”). This being Destroyer, its paramours-on-the-run exuberance is judiciously spiked by his deadpan delivery: “Oh shit, here comes the sun…”

Like the other DB, Mr. Bejar has long displayed a chameleonic instinct for change while maintaining a unified aesthetic (rather than just pinballing between reference points). No two records sound the same, but they’re always uniquely Destroyer. His latest incarnation often appears to take sonic cues from a distinctly British (usually Scottish, to be precise) strain of sophisti-pop: you might hear traces of Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout, Orange Juice, or The Blow Monkeys. These songs merge a casual literary brilliance with intense melodic verve, nimble arrangements, and a certain blue-eyed soul sadness.

Playfully rueful, “Sun in the Sky” foregrounds cryptic lyrical dexterity over pop-classicist strum before gradually left-fielding into rhythmically supple, delirious avant-squall. It’s as if Talk Talk took over a Lloyd Cole show. Originally released on a collaborative EP with electronic maestros Tim Hecker and Loscil (the latter’s drones are retained here), a retooled “Archer on the Beach” suggests Sade swimming in The Blue Nile, smooth-jazz marimba melancholy dilated by ecstatic ambience. Flecked in heady dissonance, elusively alluring, Dan hymns its eponymous “impossible raver on your death bed” while implicitly beckoning the listener: “Careful now, watch your step, in you go.”

That’s Poison Season in essence: familiar yet mysterious, opaquely accessible. Arch, for sure, but ultimately elevatory.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: After the incredible Kapputt, Destroyer change style again but crucially Keep The Tunes!

TRACK LISTING

1 Time Square, Poison Season
2 Dream Lover
3 Forces From Above
4 Hell
5 The River
6 Girl In A Sling
7 Times Square
8 Archer On The Beach
9 Midnight Meet The Rain
10 Solace's Bride
11 Bangkok
12 Sun In The Sky
13 Time Square Poison Season II

Produced by JC/DC and recorded at their studio in Vancouver earlier this summer, ‘Five Spanish Songs’ features musical contributions from Nicolas Bragg, David Carswell, John Collins, Stephen Hamm, and Josh Wells.

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar writes: “It was 2013. The English language seemed spent, despicable, not easily singable. It felt over for English; good for business transactions, but that’s about it. The only other language I know is Spanish, and the only Spanish songs I really know are those of Sr. Chinarro, led by Antonio Luque. I've been a decades-long fan of how he conducted his affairs, his strange words, his melodies that have always felt so natural (this is important), his bitter songs about painting the light. Something about them, I knew I could do it...”

Destroyer is Dan Bejar from Vancouver, British Columbia. ‘Kaputt’ is his latest vision: an opulent, lyrical, game-changing masterpiece to rank with the choicest works of Sade, Scritti Politti, Simply Red and Steely Dan.

For a more contemporary touchstone, consider this album as the sad-eyed psychic cousin of GAYNGS’ smooth opus ‘Relayted’. These elaborate songs were lovingly crafted by a large studio ensemble of dedicated players; they are given fresh life on the road by an eight-piece touring band which will visit European shores for the first time this year.

‘Kaputt’ entered the Billboard chart at number 62 and received exultant hosannas from such publications as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin and The Washington Post. Pitchfork awarded it their Best New Music accolade, noting that “‘Kaputt’ feels wise. Like a mirror that actually points back at something better. ‘Kaputt’ rolls luxuriously in its own plush soft-rock grandeur, powerfully alluring and deeply sad at the same time.”

An exploration of American music that spans from the 60s folk movement to the country sounds of the 70s, to the pop balladry and prog rock of the 80s, has earned notice ranging from Rolling Stone magazine to late night  network television. But there is more to Blitzen Trapper than those traditions. More than anything, the band credit their music to their Pacific Northwest home.

"Destroyer Of The Void" was recorded with Portland musician and studio engineer Mike Coykendall (Bright Eyes, M Ward, She & Him).
Preternatural musical siblings Peter Broderick (Horse Feathers, Efterklang) and Heather Woods Broderick (Efterklang) wrote the album’s string arrangements and Alela Diane lent her angelic vocals to the duet "The Tree".

They've toured with Hatebreed and Papa Roach and have been around for a while without a proper record deal now signed to Victory Records and with they're strongest, hardest, heaviest tracks yet things are gonna change for this lot.