This is Destroyer week here at Audiofile. The band's seventh album is out on Tuesday, so today, Wednesday and Thursday I'm posting tracks from it. Why three days devoted to one album? Because I haven't been this excited about a new release in an age. Because it happens that two of the three best tracks are available online, and Merge Records has generously given me permission to post the third. Because if you're looking for the "new Dylan," here he is. Not in the usual sense of a doomed attempt to copy Dylan's style, struggling with the anxiety of influence and losing the fight (Conor Oberst comes to mind). But in that, while listening to Destroyer singer and songwriter Dan Bejar's music, you may feel the same sense of insurgent poetic force, of surpassing wit and bitterness and overwhelming intelligence, the sense that the songwriter is many steps ahead of the listener in unraveling all the myriad interpretations of his work, which Dylan at his best can give you.
-- T.B.
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