Notorious Lightning and Other Works EP
by Matthew Murphy
Daniel Bejar reworks a half-dozen Your Blues tracks with help from Frog Eyes guitarist and vocalist Carey Mercer.
For Destroyer fans, the six songs on Notorious Lightning and Other Works will sound familiar-- although perhaps not as familiar as they might think. All six tracks appeared on 2004's grandiose Your Blues, on which singer-songwriter and New Pornographer Daniel Bejar took his heady popcraft to new heights of synthesized theatricality. At subsequent live gigs, however, Bejar performed with the crazed snake charmers (and fellow Vancouverites) of Frog Eyes as his backing band, and was apparently so tickled by the results that he has here attempted to bottle that genie for home use.
Recorded over the course of a weekend (and entirely without Bejar's usual regard for subtlety) the new versions of these songs get fingered and manhandled to such degrees that those who love the verdant, extraterrestrial warmth of Your Blues might not want to look. Though Notorious Lightning finds Destroyer returning to a more traditional guitar-based instrumental line-up, this nevertheless feels like a riskier work than Your Blues, but unfortunately it seems to be one whose rewards don't merit the risk.
With Frog Eyes guitarist and vocalist Carey Mercer serving as his primary foil, Bejar continually pushes his songs (not to mention his vocal chords) in directions they seem reluctant to go. The disk kicks off with the group stretching the spine of the titular "Notorious Lightning", giving the rousing Your Blues anthem a thorough electric going-over. Mercer's guitar spits long streams of tobacco juice over the verses before he and Bejar proceed to trade jabs and wounded howls for nearly 10 minutes. Like so many recent guitar-based tracks this bears certain similarities to Television, although I must say it's one of the few that I recall that seems interested in surpassing the reedy distress of Tom Verlaine's vocal delivery. This is a tactic that carries with it a needlessly high irritation factor, though to his credit (I guess) Bejar holds nothing back, continually squeezing his voice to its extremes with obvious emotive relish.
Some of the other tracks-- such as the steam-rolling "New Ways of Living" or the Bowie-meets-the-Dead space blues of "Don't Become the Thing You Hated"-- fare better in this harsh environment, although I don't know if any of them could necessarily be said to improve upon the Your Blues versions. Too often Bejar's bountiful hooks and deft lyrics get so buried beneath careless bluster that the uninformed newcomer might not even realize what they're missing. Longtime Destroyer followers are savvy enough not to expect Bejar to travel from point to point in a straight line, but for those just coming around to the ample charms of Your Blues, this unruly EP might prove to be one left turn too many.