The Daily Spin, April 22
Destroyer | Kaputt
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Kaputt (2011)
Artist: Destroyer
Link:
Somewhere on the subway line in the middle of Deerhunter and Broken Social Scene sits Destroyer, with his minimal folk-rock that made him a centerpiece for The New Pornographers having given him a career for nearly 30 years. It’s not hard to see what draws people to this sort of music, sparse, never anything more than it needs to be.
He’s a little theatric, a little desperate, a little harsh, and a little dense. It’s not always the friendliest sound, but it’s a sound that undeniably works. This album, particularly, seems to be the point in his career in which more instruments were added into the rotation, to great effect - a little touch of electronica does a great deal to push this sort of music to the next level through depth - even though they’re rarely front and center, the dimensionality they give to each song allows for greater heights. So, too, does the saxophone play here - giving it all a very Jon Bois-like feel. I feel like I should be getting my heart broken by a story I didn’t know about ten minutes prior listening to some of these hooks.
Though it slips a little in the back half of the album, I’m still having a blast listening to this album, and I feel like it’s the point of this project distilled - I’d never listened to this band before, and now I think it’s going to become a regular part of my rotation.
Rating: 8.5/10
Best Tracks: Poor in Love; Suicide Demo for Kara Walker
Worst Tracks: Downtown