Roy Harper - 'Born in Captivity' (Awareness)

And we finally reach the end of the Roy Harper gauntlet. It's been a fun ride, no? Born in Captivity was released in 1984, so we've skipped ahead a few years, right over 1982's Work of Heart of which this record is supposedly the demo tapes of. Not being familiar with that record, I can only go by this which is mostly 'stripped-down' in the sense that it's Harper and an electric guitar, except for the more fleshed out cuts like 'Drawn to the Flames' and 'I Am a Child'. Harper in the 80s takes on the aesthetic that seduced many at the time - 'Child' has a mid tempo backing band and crippled guitar tones, sounding a bit like Hall & Oates or whatever was floating around at the time. This sound isn't so poo-poo'd any longer though it still sounds to me like the music I grew up rebelling against in some way. But unaccompanied, or barely accompanied, it sounds like 70s Harper, for the most part. Both sides start with songs named after people. 'Elizabeth' appears in full form on Whatever Happened to Jugula? but here is a confident slow-burner, a touching and intimate hymn for hope. 'Stan' is a song (I think) about football legend Stanley Matthews and thus I sorta like it for that reason, as it elevates him to some sort of mythic figure. Hey, I like nostalgia, especially nostalgia for a British life I never led. And then there's 'Work of Heart' , the six part song suite that fills out side two. It's hard to click with this, as perhaps I've just heard too many really long Roy Harper songs in the last few days. Or maybe the lack of full instrumentation drags this down, as all of the others (even 'McGoohan's Blues') featured a backing band. The first and last parts are called 'No One Ever Gets Out Alive', and those are catchy enough melodies, but all the stuff in the middle is hard to focus on. There are some swirling, descending guitar riffs here that sound exactly like the Page-guesting on 'The Same Old Rock', and I wonder if it's supposed to be a quote or just a struggling artist returning to one of his greatest triumphs. This isn't a terrible record by any means, and I always like when artists release the demos of something. Going through all of these Roy Harper albums, a careful reader will notice that I'm not super fair to Mr. Harper. I celebrate him for his audacity, but then prefer the straight ahead folk songs; I commend his visceral lyrics about religion and society, but then chide him for his misogyny. But that's really what it comes down to with Harper - he's a complex, fucked-up contradiction of an artist, and that's what makes him resonate so much with me still. I'm sure there's great material throughout his 80s and 90s output, and I'd love someone to make me a mix of the best of that era.

Destroyer - 'City of Daughters' (Tinker/Cave Canem)

I don't have the privilege of seeing the Soundscan figures, but I'd guess that latest Destroyer album at the time of this writing, Kaputt, had to be his biggest selling. Maybe I should actually say biggest 'hit' because popularity probably has little connection these days to actually 'moving units' or whatever they used to say. I feel like everywhere I go nowadays, I encounter some kid playing it through laptop speakers. Good for Bejar, cause he's been churning out great music for a long time and I'm happy for him to find an audience, even if I'm personally yet to click with Kaputt. City of Daughters is from the other end of his career - it's not his first album but his first really good one. This is almost as stripped-down as his debut, based mostly around acoustic guitar and voice, though with some Emax synthesiser interludes and a nice backing band here and there. The Emax interludes aren't just filler - 'Emax II' is a lovely bit of electroacoustic residue.  It's tough for me to write about Destroyer as I find him to be the Canadian indie-rock reincarnation of Wallace Stevens - difficult as all-fuck to 'explain' but more than easy to be moved by. The musical cadences are the bonus that Mr. Bejar has over Mr. Stevens, so there's added non-meaning through emphasis and catchiness. For example, 'I Want This Cyclops' is a wonderful jaunty ride, but it's something about two sisters on a plane and an actual saskwatch with one eye, and the fuck if I can figure it out. But that's modernism at it's best - I can put my own meaning into things, and I've done that a lot. Maybe I just like singing along about the 'new heretical dawn'. Did I mention I love Destroyer? I've been immersed in his work since Streethawk: A Seduction, which we'll get to soon enough on the CD blog, and I've always seen City of Daughters, Thief, and Streehawk as a trilogy even though there's not much to link them besides a similar sound in the backing bands (though the lineups aren't consistent). This is a less ambitious Destroyer - before the big production of This Night, the midi experiments of Your Blues, the temporary 'return to form' of Rubies and of course Kaputt's 80's disco coke gloss. But again, what makes these records so different? The lyrics are always great, so it really comes down to my own personal tastes - I like the simplicity of songs like 'School, And the Girls Who Go There' more - they're somewhere in-between coffeeshop troubadour and indie pick-up band. Jennifer's halter top is a consecrated altar, after all. Like Queen, he actually saved the title track for his next album. This also has 'No Cease Fires! (Crimes Against the State of Our Love, Baby)' which should have been a smash hit anthem in an alternate universe (how many times do I type those words in these pages?). It's a confident record, a real portrait of a Canadian 1996 at least as I imagine it, and the start of something great.