Destroyer

A Canadian Indie Pop Rock/Baroque Rock/European Blues band consisting of frontman Daniel Bejar (also of the bands The New Pornographers and Swan Lake) and has had varying members throughout the band's history. After releasing the 2006 album, "Destroyer's Rubies", Bejar stated that the personnel of that album (Ted Bois, Nicolas Bragg, Tim Loewen, Scott Morgan, Fisher Rose, John Collins, and Bejar himself)would remain the permanent band roster, excluding Collins and Rose, who played minor roles on the album. Destroyer began as Daniel Bejar's solo project in 1996, which he started in his small home in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Initially, Destroyer gained little reception at all. By 2000, when Bejar collaborated with Carl Newman, Todd Fancey, Neko Case, and others to form The New Pornographers, Destroyer had already released 3 LP's. Though Bejar has only contributed to each of The New Pornographer's albums with merely 2-4 songs, his collaboration with them is possibly what gained him a bulk of his attention. I say bulk, because, though Destroyer had less than a cult following by the time The New Pornographer's first album, "Mass Romantic" was released, Bejar had still managed to form a full band and release a few albums. Bejar is known for being very poetic and subliminal in his lyrics, and for having paragraphs and paragraphs of said lyrics in one song (example: "Rubies", on Destroyer's Rubies). Bejar will often write cryptic lyrics, and lyrics that at times may seem completely and utterly meaningless, though he usually has intent behind them. In early 2008, Bejar collaborated with his girlfriend, a visual artist, Sydney Vermont, to form the duo, "Hello, Blue Roses." Aside from his minor collaborations with The New Pornographers, Swan Lake, and his project with Vermont, Bejar has remained more than faithful to Destroyer, releasing, as of 2008, 9 LP's, not to mention numerous EP's and demos. Destroyer typically only goes on tour to promote an album, and more often that not, performs primarily in bars, but also performs at indie music festivals, such as the annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. Destroyer has been respectfully compared to David Bowie, My Bloody Valentine, and Pavement; Bejar admits the band's influence from Pavement and the band, Guided By Voices.