1. Kaputt / Destroyer

Kaputt is the most beguiling album of the year.

On Destroyer's ninth album, Vancouver's Dan Bejar navigates the backrooms of the world, breathing cinematic life into a modern, urban noir. An atmosphere of rain-soaked city parks, throbbing nightclubs, and deserted downtown streets is described in exquisite language; Bejar's lyrical approach to his cosmopolitan subjects is nothing short of poetry. Musically, Kaputt melds watery bass-lines, smooth jazz, and new wave guitars into a lush canvas of scenesters, romantics, and playboys, all of them literate, wry, and wizened. Question: Can a record this stylized actually be the best album of the year? Answer: Need you even ask?

The words! Bejar's stream-of-consciousness is evocative. Serving as our guide and shaman--the Mystic Prince of the Purlieu at Night--Behar passes for a downtown Whitman, backed by a chorus of saxophones and trumpets sent from the reverbed heavens.

I wrote a song for America.

They told me it was clever.

Jessica is gone on vacation on

The dark side of town forever.

Who knew . . . Who knew . . .

The juxtaposition of Bejar's city poems against his immaculate take on so-called smooth jazz--a form of music that some might perceive as ironic or worse--reinforces the powerful allure of his subjects and, arguably, may be the crowning achievement of Kaputt. "Chinatown," the year's best album opener, chronicles the magnetic pull of desolate, late-night apocryphas:

You can't believe

The way the wind is talking to the sea.

I heard that someone said it before,

I don't care,

I can't walk away, I can't walk away . . .

In Chinatown . . .

The solitary poet in "Blue Eyes" seeks refuge in the pursuit of romance:

You terrify the land.

You are pestle and mortar.

Your first love's new order:

Mother Nature's Son.

King of the Everglades: Population 1.

I write poetry for myself! I write poetry for myself!

You're a permanent figure of jacked-up sorrow.

I want you to love me. You send me a coffin of roses.

I guess that's the way things go

These days . . .

(Even Bejar's come-ons are shrouded in poetic signifiers, as he repeatedly whispers to his elusive lover I've thumbed through the books on your shelves. These lines come off sounding like the most intimate thing he could ever hope to say to a woman).

"Savage Night at the Opera" is an aesthetic show-down of sorts, the musician's shrugging confrontation with another musician (or perhaps even himself):

Yes. I'm familiar with your scene.

Some would say, shockingly uptight.

21-gun salute to the Fallen Birds of the Sky.

I heard their record, it's alright . . .

Hey, Infinite Sense Of Value . . .

Hey, Infinite Sense Of Value . . .

Hey, Mystic Princie Of The Purlieu At Night!

I heard your record, it's alright . . .

"Poor in Love" is a confessional conversation amid personal (and man-made) ruin:

I was poor in love. I was poor in wealth.

I was okay in everything else there was.

Oh, I was poor in love.

She took me aside and said--

"Look I don't do this every day,

You got style! . . . All you've got is style!

I can see it from a mile away!"

Oh, I was poor in love.

"You were born okay.

Rich in name alone.

Your Jesuit profile will suit

The coming apocalypse!"

Oh, I was poor in love.

Poor in love . . .

Bejar's lyrical brilliance is a thing to behold, as the imaginative refrains keep coming with an almost blinding precision. Largely driven by the epiphanies strewn throughout the record, somehow, incredibly, each of the nine tracks on Kaputt managed to be my favorite song of the year at some point in time. The literary riches in "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" and the incomparable 13-minute closer "Bay of Pigs" are almost too difficult to describe. And this is an easy-listening pop album?

The vocals! It would be too clever by half to call Bejar's duet partner, Vancouver singer Sibel Thrasher, a modern-day Dickinson because clearly she gets out of the house. Indeed, she would disagree that there is no frigate like a book--she has a voice that has seen things. Where Thrasher's vocal counterbalance is womanly--even heavenly--Bejar's singing is cool, sophisticated, and dipped in a Dylan-esque quill. To help emphasize the free-flowing verses that permeate the album, Bejar reportedly recorded some of his vocal tracks while lying down on his couch.

The soundtrack! Kaputt easily employs the best-sounding horns of the past decade (and probably much longer). Where the music might be passed off as an amusing distraction at first, if not a winking derivation of soft-jazz tropes, repeated listens reveal a richness that belies mere irony. The music is soulful, artful, yes, even beautiful. Where else can you get a three minute pan-flute intro for a song about race and violence that finishes with a groovy, trumpet-infested breakdown?

The prologue! It cannot be over-emphasized: the degree of difficulty in pulling off this album is, well, off the charts. In lesser hands, the record would have sounded ridiculous, a lightweight rip-off circa 1981. Even the lyrics could have been a bumbling mess, untethered to the underlying music. But Bejar is no fool. Without sounding neither sleight nor overwrought, he weaves his nonchalant, lyrical asides across jazz-lite jams that, significantly, brim with sincerity, humor, and pathos. Bejar's sly bemusement is so casual, so off-the-cuff, one gets the feeling that he is worrying about something else at the same time he is explaining everything listeners need to know about the human drama.

Like some of The D Man's favorite albums during his adult life, I could think about--and discuss--Destroyer's record for the better part of the day. The album is such a bewitching aesthetic achievement, I feel compelled to write a thesis to unearth its virtues. Not surprisingly, such heavy lifting, while sure to be enlightening, is ultimately unnecessary with this immediate musical pleasure.

Kaputt.