Destroyer: Destroyer's Rubies: *Sixeyes Review

Destroyer
Destroyer's Rubies
[Merge Records - February 21]
*Sixeyes Score: 8.1 out of 10


He forgot the Fodors (or was it Frommer's?) on the seat of the inter-city bus. He could recall seeing it there as the bus entered the tunnel. He remembered drawing his fingertips across the oily food stains on the book's paper jacket... braille for the junk food lover. Telling stories of potato chips and french fries, toasted subs and burgers, a diary of fat cells and their birth. If he had picked up that guide book he would have realized that it'd be useless in the land of Rubies...

I was going to write a little story (and that's what opens this review) about trying to get into the latest album from Destroyer, but the only way to get close to the heart of Destroyer's Rubies is to have lived in the previous albums, such as Streethawk: A Seduction, Your Blues, and This Night--to know them as an artist would know the details of his last painting's subject. But don't conclude that a neophyte will be lost within these 10 songs, songs about love and blood and paint... songs that fold in upon themselves, songs that have a foot, or at least a finger or two (even if, at times, it's the middle one), in the past. These are beautiful melodies bearing obtuse lyrics, they don't grow on you, you grow from them, upon them, you are the plant and the music the dirt and soil in which you grow.

Destroyer's Rubies is braille for the seeing and the seeking... a language you know, but don't yet understand. Not a map, nor an answer, it is a boxful of postcards to and from people you haven't met and never will... at turns fascinating and then mysterious, yet always a riddle. And one of the riddles is: Why does he have to keep reminding me of Groucho Marx when he delivers lines like "A series of visions/I won't repeat them here/I won't repeat them here" in opening track"Rubies"?

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Limited Download
+ A Dangerous Woman Up To A Point

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