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‘Dan's Boogie' Review: Destroyer's Songwriting Stays Sharp

‘Dan's Boogie' Review: Destroyer's Songwriting Stays Sharp

Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Bejar has been sharing thoughts about the world outside his window for 30 years. Early on as the frontman of Destroyer, which oscillates between a solo project and a band, he wrote songs that touched on the Vancouver music scene, politics and the perils of romance, spicing up his stories with literary and musical allusions and quirky diction. As he's aged, Mr. Bejar's wry observations have grown broader, and details from his life often serve as punchlines to his setups. He's found a comfortable place as an indie-rock institution. His audience is modest but loyal, and they love hearing from him on new records every couple of years.
Mr. Bejar's songwriting voice is specific to him and doesn't change much from one LP to the next—he strings one funny line after another about the people and places he encounters, and these lines almost magically assemble into complete statements that are both clever and touching. What varies is Destroyer's musical setting. Early on, the project was rooted in folk, with Mr. Bejar frequently delivering his lyrics over acoustic guitars. More recently, he's experimented with a sax-driven ambience that dances between early-'80s yacht rock and the new romantic balladeers who followed in the wake of Roxy Music. The title of the new Destroyer album 'Dan's Boogie' (Merge), out Friday, is characteristically self-referential and suggests we could be in for a bluesy, hip-shaking record. But this time, Mr. Bejar opts for a survey of favored styles from the past, while his writing remains as sharp as ever.
The fake-out of the title sets the stage for an album that creates expectations and then subverts them. Once again working with producer and multi-instrumentalist John Collins, Mr. Bejar indulges his fascination with artifice, experimenting with how a song's arrangement can convey gnawing disappointment and puncture pretension with wit. 'The Same Thing as Nothing at All' opens like a rapidly rising curtain, as a wall of synthesized strings and horns delivers a cheap, knock-off version of grandeur. The singer's voice is processed to sound like it's echoing upward from the bottom of a well, and he sounds exhausted and slightly irritated as he delivers lines like 'The chandelier struggles to light / Up the night.'
The following 'Hydroplaning off the Edge of the World' is a huge, electrifying buzz of a song, with 'ba-di-ba' backing vocals and a rush of synth drone. It's an oddly catchy and even hypnotic number that instantly ranks with Mr. Bejar's finest creations. He delivers a cluster of images and sensations detailing a world that's gone mad—as he wanders the streets, he encounters a priest who mistakes him for a fellow man of the cloth, and then bumps into someone who wonders if Mr. Bejar might be a professional basketball player. Such cases of mistaken identity are common in his music, where all and sundry are trying desperately to know themselves and figure out their place in the universe.
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'Washington Black' review: Hulu miniseries amplifies action from novel
'Washington Black' review: Hulu miniseries amplifies action from novel

Los Angeles Times

time14 hours ago

  • Los Angeles Times

'Washington Black' review: Hulu miniseries amplifies action from novel

Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan's 'Washington Black,' a prizewinning story of race, romance, friendship and identity set in the early 19th century, has been translated by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and Kimberly Ann Harrison into a Hulu miniseries. Unsurprisingly, it plays more like a miniseries than a novel, amplifying the action, the drama and the romance; beefing up lesser characters; drawing lines under, after all, valid points about prejudice, inequality and injustice; and dressing it up with Hollywood musical cues. Taking the show as a sometimes fantastic historical adventure, those aren't bad things, but, unlike the book, subtlety is not the series' strong suit. 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(James Van Evers / Disney) 2. Sterling K. Brown, an executive producer, also stars. (Chris Reardon / Disney) Meanwhile, if that's the word, back in 1830, the future looks dim for young Wash under the harsh rule of plantation owner Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), a situation eased only by his beloved caring protector Big Kit (Shaunette Renée Wilson). (Ironically, the end of slavery throughout the British Empire was just around the corner.) One day, Erasmus' brother Christopher (Tom Ellis), called Titch, arrives driving a giant steam-powered tractor for no practical reason other than to announce him as a somewhat eccentric inventor, like Caractacus Pott; but it provides a point of connection between Titch and Wash, who becomes his assistant. Another character who had to leave London, Titch plans to use an island hilltop to launch his 'cloud cutter,' a flying machine that won't exist in the real world for many years but which looks cool. (Steampunk is the applicable term.) 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(There are bounty hunters from down south, looking for Wash; Billy Boyd, former Hobbit, is wonderfully creepy as Willard.) As to Wash, it's not enough that he's a gifted artist and scientist; the show introduces him as 'a boy brave enough to change the world.' Advertisement The novel trots the globe, from Barbados to Virginia to Nova Scotia to the Arctic to London to Morocco, and besides the hot-air balloon, includes the invention of the public aquarium. Though only four episodes of the series were available to review, photos indicate that lands of snow and sand are indeed on the itinerary (not sure about the aquarium), and as a fan of 19th century globe-trotting adventures, I do remain eager to see what the series makes of them. Kingsley and Evans, in their blossoming love story and otherwise, are good company throughout. Edugyan ends her book on a suspended chord, a note of mystery I don't imagine will be definitive enough for the filmmakers. But we shall see.

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