TROUBLE in DREAMS, pt. 1

Destroyer - "Rivers"

"Hands tied behind your back.  Steel chair giving you shivers.
You've always had problems flowing down rivers."

Trouble in Dreams strikes me as the perfect title for a Destroyer album--probably the best one Dan Bejar has come up with yet. It's particularly great for his latest album, because with this album, I think he's given over to his intuition more completely than ever before. Judging from the last five Destroyer albums (I've only heard Streethawk: A Seduction onwards), Dreams stands as his most surreal and least "rational" collection of songs to date. And it has not received nearly as much love as it deserves, in my opinion. This is sorta my attempt to rectify that.

For me, writing about this album is a bit of a nightmare in itself. Trouble in Dreams had me completely hooked for about a month from March to April of this year. I would go to work with it on my Zen Micro (no iPod here), and it was pretty much all I would listen to. But the number of times I've sat down to type up a post, everything I've wanted to say about it has felt so scattered and pointless. The album is gearing up to be one of my favourites of 2008, and I'm still not really sure what can be said about it. As an unqualified music blogger, I'm grasping at straws all the time, but more so with this album. Still, I feel like I should take the time to get some thoughts down, and express some excitement about it, even if it ends up being somewhat of a senseless exercise.

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